Michele L. Pucak

Michele Pucak joined NINDS in 2022 as a Health Program Specialist supporting the Neurotechnology and Integrated Systems Cluster within the BRAIN Initiative. She previously worked in the Department of Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins, where her primary responsibility was the oversight of the departmental Imaging Core. She performed postdoctoral research at Duke University in the laboratory of David Fitzpatrick, where she used intrinsic signal optical imaging techniques to interrogate the neural circuitry underlying response properties of neurons in visual cortex.  Prior to that position, she studied the neurocircuitry of nonhuman primate prefrontal cortex in the laboratory of Dr. David Lewis at the University of Pittsburgh. Michele's doctoral research, also performed at the University of Pittsburgh in the laboratory of Dr. Tony Grace, investigated the regulation of midbrain dopamine neurons by somatodendritic autoreceptors in a mouse model of Parkinson's disease.