Biosketch
Robert C. Malenka is the Pritzker Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Director of the Nancy Pritzker Laboratory and Deputy Director of the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute. After graduating from Harvard College he received an M.D. and a Ph.D. in neuroscience in 1983 from Stanford University School of Medicine. Over the ensuing 6 years he completed residency training in psychiatry at Stanford and 4 years of postdoctoral research at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). In 1989, he was appointed Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Physiology at UCSF, at which he reached the rank of Full Professor in 1996. In addition to running an active research program at UCSF he was the Director of the Center for the Neurobiology of Addiction and Associate Director of the Center for Neurobiology and Psychiatry. He returned to the Stanford University School of Medicine in 1999. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine as well as an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology.
Research Interests
The Malenka lab conducts research on the synaptic and circuit mechanisms underlying a wide range of adaptive and pathological motivated behaviors of relevance to brain disorders including addiction, depression, autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder and Parkinson's disease.
Membership Type
Member
Election Year
2011
Primary Section
Section 24: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience
Secondary Section
Section 28: Systems Neuroscience