Sam Merlin was born in Melbourne, Australia, and studied at the University of Melbourne, before completing his PhD at the University of Sydney, in 2011. He then moved to Salt Lake City for a post-doctoral position as the University of Utah, studying primate visual neurocircuitry with Alessandra Angelucci.
He moved back to Australia to take up an academic position at Western Sydney University in 2017. His work has focused primarily on the neural circuits underlying contextual modulation in visual processing, but has recently included prefrontal cortical influences on learning and behaviour.
Sam has published 15 papers, and was awarded the Bercovici Prize in Anatomy in 2014. He also holds an honorary fellow appointment in the Department of Optometry and Vision Science at the University of Melbourne, with collaborator Trichur Vidyasagar
