Michael F. Land

Michael Francis Land FRS (12 April 1942 – 14 December 2020) was a British neurobiologist. He was a professor of neurobiology in the vision laboratory at the Sussex Centre for Neuroscience, University of Sussex, England.

Land's research was on different aspects of animal and human vision. His interests were in the optics of the eyes of marine animals, including scallops, shrimps and deep-water crustaceans. He also studied visual behaviour in spiders and insects, particularly during pursuit. This led to an interest in eye movement in animals and later in man.

Land's group was mainly concerned with the role of eye movement in human activities such as driving, music reading and ball games. In 2000, Land and a colleague reported their finding that within 200 milliseconds after a ball leaves a cricket bowler's hand, the best batsmen will take their eyes off the ball and look ahead to the point where they have calculated it will bounce (see also Land & McLeod (2000) in bibliography).

Other work was on the processing of visual information by the retinas of mosquitoes.

He died on 14 December 2020 at the age of 78.