Maxwell Shafer is an incoming Assistant Professor in the department of Cell & Systems Biology at the University of Toronto (July 2023). He leads the Sleep Evolution Group, which studies the genomics and evolutionary history of sleep across animal phyla.

Max received both his M.Sc. and H.B.Sc. in Cell and Developmental Biology from the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, where he worked with Dr. Sashko Damjanovski as a Queen Elizabeth II Graduate Scholar. He completed his PhD in Biochemistry in the laboratory of Dr. Maxime Bouchard at the Goodman Cancer Research Centre where he studied the developmental morphogenesis of prostate epithelia and the origins of prostate cancer as a Prostate Cancer Canada Graduate Scholar. Max then undertook post-doctoral work in the laboratory of Dr. Alex Schier, first at Harvard University, then at the Biozentrum at the University of Basel as a CIHR Postdoctoral Fellow. In Basel he began work with Dr. Walter Salzburger on the evolutionary genomics of sleep in African cichlid fish.