Stuart Cull-Candy is Professor of Neuroscience at UCL. He is distinguished for his elucidation of fundamental postsynaptic mechanisms underlying synaptic transmission in the mammalian brain. A pioneer of patch-clamp studies of glutamate-activated ion channels, he has made major contributions to our understanding of the actions of the most important excitatory transmitter in the mammalian brain. His early work provided the first measurement for the conductance of a glutamate receptor channel and a series of important voltage-clamp studies on defective human endplates identified fundamental changes associated with myasthenia and related diseases. However he is best known for his work on glutamate receptors at central synapses. He described the single channel properties of NMDA and non-NMDA receptor channels, discovered that the channels open to multiple conductance levels and identified a modulatory ‘proton site’ on the NMDA receptor. Recently, he has identified a new form of synaptic plasticity in the CNS associated with edited AMPA receptor subunits. Few neuroscientists have received greater national and international recognition.