Mark T. Wallace

Mark Wallace (born 1959) is an American neuroscientist currently holding the Louise B. McGavock Chair of Neuroscience at Vanderbilt University.

Biography
Wallace graduated in biology from Temple University in 1985, where he also completed a master's degree in biology and a Ph.D. in Neurobiology in 1990. He was also a post-doctoral fellow at the Medical College of Virginia from 1990 to 1993.

Wallace was Director of the Vanderbilt Brain Institute from 2008 to 2021. Wallace was an assistant professor in the department of physiology at the Medical College of Virginia for a year before moving to Wake Forest University School of Medicine where he was assistant professor from 1994 to 2002 and associate professor from 2002 to 2005.

Wallace joined the faculty at Vanderbilt University in 2006 where he has held positions in the departments of Hearing and Speech Sciences, Psychology and Pharmacology. Wallace was dean of the Graduate School at Vanderbilt University from 2015 to 2020. Wallace is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2017) and of the Association for Psychological Science (2018).

Wallace heads the Multisensory Research Lab which studies the neural bases of multisensory processing. He is a member of the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center.

Research
Wallace is an expert on multisensory integration using animal behavior, neurophysiological recordings from single neurons and ensembles of neurons, neuroanatomical tract tracing, human psychophysics and fMRI.

In studies in the rat, Wallace discovered that neurons located between sensory-specific areas (e.g., only visual or auditory) responded to inputs from several modalities (e.g., both visual and auditory). His most cited work (521 citations as in June 2023) has demonstrated that older adults benefit more than younger ones from redundant information across multiple sensory channels (e.g., vision and audition).

His research on visual perception in Autism was featured in Scientific American. Wallace has co-authored books on multi-sensory integration.

Selected publications

 * Laurienti, P. J., Burdette, J. H., Maldjian, J. A., & Wallace, M. T. (2006). Enhanced multisensory integration in older adults. Neurobiology of aging, 27(8), 1155–1163.
 * Stevenson, R. A., Siemann, J. K., Schneider, B. C., Eberly, H. E., Woynaroski, T. G., Camarata, S. M., & Wallace, M. T. (2014). Multisensory temporal integration in autism spectrum disorders. Journal of Neuroscience, 34(3), 691–697.
 * Wallace, M. T., Wilkinson, L. K., & Stein, B. E. (1996). Representation and integration of multiple sensory inputs in primate superior colliculus. Journal of neurophysiology, 76(2), 1246–1266.