Michael Balls CBE (born 1938) is a British zoologist and professor emeritus of medical cell biology at the University of Nottingham.
He conducted research for a DPhil from Oxford at the University of Geneva Switzerland between 1961 and 1964, followed by post-doctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley, CA, and at Reed College, Portland, OR, from 1964 to 1966.
Balls lectured in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of East Anglia, a job that he had got through his friend Ian Gibson.
[1] In 1975, he moved to the University of Nottingham Medical School as a senior lecturer in the Department of Human Morphology.
In 1993, Balls became the first Head of the European Centre for the Validation of Alternative Methods (ECVAM) which was established in 1991 within the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC).