Alan McComas was born in Western Australia and educated in Britain, gaining degrees in physiology, medicine, and surgery at Durham University. Following postdoctoral studies at University College London and the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases, he established a muscle and nerve research laboratory at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. In 1971 he was appointed Professor of Medicine and Head of Neurology at McMaster University in Canada, where he has remained ever since. One of the first to record from single units in the human thalamus, Alan McComas has continued an active interest in brain neurophysiology, including the neural basis of migraine. Among other pioneering achievements he is known for having developed electrophysiological methods for estimating the numbers and types of motor nerve cell in the live human spinal cord and brain stem. The author of the 2014 award-winning Galvani's Spark: The Story of the Nerve Impulse (OUP, 2011), Alan McComas has published some 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers and other articles.