Michael S. Fanselow

Dr. Michael Fanselow is co-founder and Director of Research at Neurovation Labs. Dr. Fanselow received his B.S. in Psychology from CUNY Brooklyn College and his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in Biobehavioral Psychology. He received the Edwin B. Newman Award for Excellence in Research for his dissertation work there. Dr. Fanselow is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles and has held academic appointments at Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute and Dartmouth College before coming to UCLA in 1987. He has also received the Early Career Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, the D. O. Hebb Award from the American Psychological Association, the Troland Award from the National Academy of Science, and is a member of the honorary Society of Experimental Psychologists. He was elected President of the American Psychological Association’s Division of Behavioral Neuroscience and Comparative Psychology and President of the Pavlovian Society.

Dr. Fanselow’s research focuses on the neurobiology of fear, anxiety & stress related behavior; he has developed the freezing assay of conditional fear, which has become one of the most widely-used tools in preclinical research of learning and memory in general, and fear and anxiety in particular. Dr. Fanselow’s lab has developed animal models of PTSD that capture several of the major components of this disorder, and he was Dr. Perusini’s graduate advisor. He has recently been appointed as the Staglin Family Chair and the Director of the Staglin Music Festival Center for Brain and Behavioral Health, whose mission is to conduct and facilitate research on the nature of mental disorders and develop pathways to restoring healthy brain function and adaptive behavior.