Michael Eisen is an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 biologist. He is currently an Investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Howard Hughes Medical Institute is a United States non-profit medical research organization based in Chevy Chase, Maryland. It was founded by the American businessman Howard Hughes in 1953. It is one of the largest private funding organizations for biological and medical research in the United...

 and Associate Professor of Genetics, Genomics and Development at University of California, Berkeley

University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

. His academic research focuses on the evolution

Evolution

Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...

 of gene regulation.

Throughout his career he has been a forceful advocate for open science - the free release of the material and intellectual product of the scientific research. He is a leading advocate of open access scientific publishing, and is co-Founder of Public Library of Science (PLoS)

Public Library of Science

The Public Library of Science is a nonprofit open-access scientific publishing project aimed at creating a library of open access journals and other scientific literature under an open content license...

. He serves on the PLoS board, and is an advisor to Science Commons

Science Commons

Science Commons is a Creative Commons project for designing strategies and tools for faster, more efficient web-enabled scientific research. The organization identifies unnecessary barriers to research, crafts policy guidelines and legal agreements to lower those barriers, and develops technology...

. His brother Jonathan Eisen

Jonathan Eisen

Jonathan A. Eisen is an American evolutionary biologist, currently working at University of California, Davis. His academic research is in the fields of evolutionary biology, genomics and microbiology and he is the academic editor-in-chief of the open-access journal PLoS Biology.In 2011 Eisen was...

is also a biologist.