Dr. Michael Friedlander

Michael is the vice president for health sciences and technology at Virginia Tech, the founding executive director of the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute (FBRI) at VTC and the senior dean for research at the VTC School of Medicine. 

He is a professor at Virginia Tech in the College of Science and helped grow FBRI to $240M in external funding with 40+ research teams. Michael pioneered labeling of individual neurons in the living brain, studied nitric oxide’s role in brain signaling, and explored synaptic communication and plasticity in traumatic brain injury. His work has appeared in top journals like Nature and Science. He previously held leadership roles at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Baylor College of Medicine and earned major honors, including AAAS Fellow, a Sloan Fellowship and the William C. Menninger Memorial award for mental health science.

Michael has served as a visiting professor at the Australian National University’s John Curtin School of Medical Research, Oxford University, and the University of Paris. Friedlander completed a bachelor’s degree in biology at Florida State University, a Ph.D. in physiology and biophysics at the University of Illinois, and postdoctoral training at the University of Virginia. He and his wife, Sandra, have five daughters and nine grandchildren. Friedlander is originally from Miami, Florida.