About me
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 has built the FBRI's programs to over $220M in extramural funding with over 40 research teams and over 500 staff and students. He has held multiple research grants on brain processes that mediate vision, developmental plasticity and traumatic brain injury. His research has been published in Cell, J. Neuroscience, Nature, Neuron, Science and PNAS.
Friedlander was the Evelyn McKnight professor at UAB and the Wilhelmina Robertson professor at Baylor College of Medicine. He served as the founding Chair of the Department of Neurobiology and Director of the Civitan International Research Center at UAB and as Chair of the Department of Neuroscience at BCM. Friedlander was the founding President of the Association of Medical School Neuroscience Department Chairs, Chair of the Council of Academic Societies of the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), and an AAMC Distinguished Service Member. He served as Chair of the National Association of Intellectual Disabilities Research Centers and as President of the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine and is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Friedlander is an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow in Neuroscience, an NIH Fogarty Center Senior International Research Fellow, a recipient of the American College of Physicians’ Menninger Award for Mental Health Research, the University of Illinois Distinguished Alumnus Award and the Distinguished Scientist Award from the Society of Experimental Biology and Medicine. Friedlander completed a BS in Biology at Florida State University, a PhD in Physiology and Biophysics at the U. of Illinois and postdoctoral training at UVA.
