Michael Bruchas

Michael received his BS in biology and his PhD in pharmacology from Creighton University in 2004 and a postdoctoral fellowship in neuroscience at the University of Washington, where he examined how neuromodulators like neuropeptides and monoamines impact stress, depression, and addiction. Dr. Bruchas’s laboratory focuses on how brain circuits are fundamentally interact, specifically how they communicate via neuromodulatory process, and he works to develop new neuroscience tools to better study these processes with high resolution. His laboratory’s discoveries have been published in many leading journals and have been featured on Public Radio, in The Wall Street Journal, Nature, The New Yorker, The Smithsonian, and Popular Science. He has awards including the NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award, an NIH EUREKA Award, the Young Investigator Award from the International Narcotics Research Conference, and several NIH BRAIN Initiatives for tool development in dissecting brain circuits. In 2018, he was awarded the NIH-MERIT award from NIDA, the Rising Star Award from the Mahoney Institute of Neuroscience, and the SfN – Jacob P. Waletzky Memorial Award for cutting-edge research in addiction. Dr. Bruchas is also co-founder of a neurotechnology company Neurolux. Dr. Bruchas resides with his wife and daughter in Fremont (Seattle) and loves travel, food, craft beer and wine, all types of music, books, the outdoors, and cycling.