Michael Friedlander

Michael Friedlander is the Vice President for Health Sciences and Technology at Virginia Tech where he also serves as the founding Director of the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute (FBRI) at VTC and as senior Dean for Research at the VTC School of Medicine. He is Professor of Biological Sciences and of Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine and is an affiliated faculty member of the School of Biomedical Engineering and Science at VT. He has built the FBRI's programs to over $240M in extramural funding with 46 research teams and over 600 staff and students. Friedlander was among the first neuroscientists to directly label and identify individual physiologically characterized neurons in the living brain, to show the importance of the diffusible gaseous signal, nitric oxide, in modifying chemical signaling and visual processing in the brain and to directly measure the communication between individual connected pairs of neurons in multiple regions of the brain including areas involved in learning and memory and visual processing (the hippocampus and the cerebral cortex). His lab’s most recent work has characterized the role that timing of electrical signals in the brain can play in plasticity after traumatic brain injury and the richness of how calcium controls synaptic communication in learning. His research findings have been published in leading scientific journals including Cell, J. Neuroscience, Nature, Neuron, three in Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science and the Journal of Neurotrauma.