Matthew MacDougall is Chief of Neurosurgery at CPMC and head neurosurgeon at Neuralink. He has worked for two decades on furthering our understanding of information encoding in the brain and creating practical means to directly interface with the human brain. Thoroughly California-based, he was raised in San Diego, attended medical school at USC, neurosurgery residency at UC San Diego, and completed a functional neurosurgery fellowship at Stanford. Living in Novato with his wife Elizabeth and their 3 small children, he enjoys surfing and rock-climbing, if he can find time.