Michael Oshinsky, Ph.D.

Dr. Michael L. Oshinsky joined the NINDS in 2014 as the Program Director for Pain and Migraine and in 2022 was appointed Director of the NINDS Office of Preclinical Pain Research. As Director, Dr. Oshinsky is responsible for coordinating the research and administrative issues related to pain and headache research across NINDS’ Divisions of Neuroscience, Translational Research and Clinical Research. Dr. Oshinsky is also a co-Chair for the trans-NIH Helping to End Addiction Long-term Initiative (HEAL). A major goal of the NIH HEAL initiative is to accelerate the discovery and pre-clinical development of pain treatments with little or no addiction liability.

Dr. Oshinsky received a B.A. in Biology with a concentration in Neuroscience from Brandeis University, where he learned electrophysiology in the laboratory of Eve Marder, Ph.D. He earned a Ph.D. in Neurobiology & Behavior from Cornell University in the laboratory of Ronald R. Hoy studying neural circuits. As an NIH sponsored postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, he trained with Gary Aston-Jones, Ph.D. in neuropharmacology and neuromodulation. He was on the faculty in the Department of Neurology at Thomas Jefferson University (TJU) from 2001-2014. At TJU, he was the Director of Preclinical Research at the Jefferson Headache Center and led an NIH funded research program aimed at developing and characterizing animal models of headache. In 2011, Dr. Oshinsky was awarded the Harold G. Wolff Award for headache research.