Dr. Michael Kilgard
- Professor of Neuroscience
- Margaret Fonde Jonsson Professor
This non-endowed faculty position is supported by UT Dallas.
“I thanked one of my early mentors in my doctoral thesis for telling me I was thinking like a technician. At the time he said that, I was a technician, but he told me, ‘Don’t do that; you can think beyond what you’re doing and your job description.’ That was a big deal for me, so now I try to give students the same opportunity to do as much as they can.”
Dr. Michael Kilgard focuses on conducting neuroscience research that can be translated into clinical settings to treat people with serious psychiatric or neurological conditions. His research using vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) to enhance recovery was first developed in animals, and he has successfully delivered the therapy for people with stroke, tinnitus, post-traumatic stress disorder and spinal cord injury. The Food and Drug Administration has approved VNS during physical therapy to improve hand weakness after stroke; studies for its use in other conditions are ongoing.
Kilgard’s early work involved exploring how the brain understands sounds and developing methods for manipulating this encoding.
“My motivation is to conduct experiments with the greatest likelihood of translating the findings to human treatments for neurological and psychiatric disorders,” Kilgard said. “A billion people worldwide have one of these conditions, and right now we mostly treat the symptoms. In the future, it will be possible to treat the underlying disease mechanism.”
Kilgard has received multimillion-dollar grants from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. His 1998 Science paper, “Cortical map reorganization enabled by nucleus basalis activity,” is among the most highly cited papers examining neural mechanisms that support the brain’s ability to change with new experiences.
He is a 2009 recipient of the Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award from The University of Texas System. His devotion to mentorship and developing translational science is evident in his UTD Cortical Plasticity Laboratory, where he maintains a group of some 40 undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral researchers.
Kilgard received a bachelor’s degree in molecular and cellular biology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1993 and a doctorate in neuroscience from UC San Francisco in 1998. He began teaching at UT Dallas in 1999 as an assistant professor and was promoted to professor in 2011.