Stephen Cannon, MD, PhD

Stephen C. Cannon, MD, PhD is a Professor in the Department of Physiology in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He received both a B.S and an M.S. in Mechanical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis in 1980. His master’s thesis explored how increased muscle stiffness and intensity of the stretch reflex with mechanical loading produces an instability that may cause tremor. Upon graduation, he entered the Medical Scientists Training Program at Johns Hopkins where he worked with Prof. David Robinson to identify the locus of the brainstem neural integrator for the oculomotor system and demonstrated how lateral inhibition is a critical neural network feature of this premotor circuit. He completed a medical internship and neurology residency at Massachusetts Hospital, where he was chief resident in 1990. Dr. Cannon then completed a research postdoctoral fellowship in David Corey’s lab, where he made a fundamental discovery of the sodium channel defect that causes susceptibility to periodic paralysis. Based on this new work on channelopathies of muscle, he started a lab in the neurobiology department at Harvard Medical School where he was on the faculty until 2002 when he moved to UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas as Chair of Neurology. In 2010, he became Associate Dean for Undergraduate Medical Education and developed a combined BA/MD training program with UT Dallas. In 2015, Dr. Cannon was recruited to UCLA as the Chair of Physiology in the David Geffen School of Medicine.

Research Interests: Ion channelopathies of skeletal muscle