Ravi Allada, M.D., has been appointed executive director of the Michigan Neuroscience Institute (MNI), the Theophile Raphael, M.D., Collegiate Professor of Neurosciences, and a professor of anesthesiology in the Medical School, effective September 1, 2023. The provost provided interim approval of these appointments, and they will be reported at the September 2023 Board of Regents meeting.
The MNI has a rich history, as it was originally established in the Medical School as a regental institute in 1955. For 65 years, as the Mental Health Research Institute (1955-95) and the Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience Institute (1995-2020), the institute focused its research on the dynamically changing brain across the lifespan. In January 2020, the regents renamed the institute the Michigan Neuroscience Institute and expanded its mission to engage researchers from multiple disciplines and units across the University of Michigan in the pursuit of addressing the most pressing questions in neuroscience at the fundamental, translational, and clinical levels, while educating future leaders in the field.
Allada returns to the University of Michigan after serving as professor and chair of the Department of Neurobiology at Northwestern University since 2012. He was appointed the Edward C. Stuntz Distinguished Professor in Neuroscience in 2015, and he also holds professor appointments in the departments of Pathology and Neurology. He received his medical degree from the U-M Medical School and completed a residency in clinical pathology at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School. During his training, he was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI)-National Institutes of Health Research Scholar and an HHMI Physician Postdoctoral Fellow.
His laboratory has discovered molecule “gears” of the core circadian clock, including a link to neurodegenerative disease, as well as pathways linking the core clock to daily rhythms of sleep and wake. His laboratory has also identified molecular processes underlying sleep, including those associated with memory processing. His work extends discoveries in flies to mammals, including the development of diagnostic biomarker signatures for circadian time and examining the effects of jet lag on athletic performance.