Bill Shafer is Programme Leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. He has made an outstanding contribution to the advancement of medical science by being the first person to use optogenetic methods to image intracellular calcium levels in tissues of a living animal, and thereby laying the foundations of a field that has revolutionised neuroscientific research. Dr Schafer is internationally renowned for his discoveries concerning the molecular genetic underpinning of neural circuitry and behaviour, achieved by far-sighted development of techniques spanning genetic manipulation, computational analysis, in vivo imaging and behavioural analyses exploiting machine vision.