Rob Malenka, MD, PhD

Dr. Robert C. Malenka is the Pritzker Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Director of the Nancy Pritzker Laboratory, and a founder of Stanford University’s Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute. His laboratory conducts research on the synaptic and circuit mechanisms that mediate motivated behaviors of relevance to a range of brain disorders including addiction, autism, and depression. In addition to his role at Stanford, Dr. Malenka also serves as an advisor at Bayshore Global Management.

Dr. Malenka is an elected member of the United States’ National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine and an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American College of Neuropsychoparmagology. He has served on the National Advisory Council on Drug Abuse and as a Councilor for the Society for Neuroscience and the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology. Dr. Malenka has received numerous awards including the Pasarow Foundation Award for Extraordinary Accomplishment in Neuropsychiatry Research, the Society for Neuroscience Julius Axelrod Prize, and Peter Seeburg Integrative Neuroscience Prize. His papers have been cited more than 100,000 times and have provided foundational knowledge about the mechanisms of synaptic plasticity and modulation in the mammalian brain. He graduated from Harvard College with an MD and from Stanford University School of Medicine with a PhD in neuroscience.