He graduated from Wesleyan University and conducted his Ph.D. research and began his post-doctoral research at The Rockefeller University in New York City in Gerald Edelman's laboratory. He later completed his postdoctoral research with Edward Ziff at New York University. During his time in Ziff's lab, he observed that the transcription of c-fos, a cellular proto-oncogene, is induced within minutes of activation by neurotrophic factors. In 1986, he moved to Boston, Massachusetts to take a job in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at Harvard Medical School. He is currently employed at Children's Hospital Boston, an institution affliated with Harvard, where he is a tenured professor http://www.hms.harvard.edu/dms/bbs/fac/greenberg.html. At Childen's Hospital, he is the director of the Division of Neuroscience. He has received numerous prizes, including the Edward M. Scolnick Prize in Neuroscience and a McKnight award for technological advances in neuroscience. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the National Academy of Sciences http://harvardscience.harvard.edu/directory/researchers/michael-e-greenberg. He has mentored a number of successful neuroscientists, including (but not limited to) Morgan Sheng, David Ginty, and Anirvan Ghosh. His lab specializes in the research of activity-dependent transcription in the intracellular signaling of neurons. Areas of interest have included c-fos, CREB, Bdnf, and MeCP2. In general, his research has also explored the molecular biology and genetics of autism spectrum disorders, including the genetic basis of nurturing.