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Biography
Spruston was named the Executive Director of HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus in 2024.
He is responsible for coordinating the research areas at Janelia to execute on Janelia’s mission and vision. He works closely with the Heads of Janelia’s research areas to determine our research priorities and strategies.
Spruston also oversees a team that coordinates a number of science-related operations at Janelia, including recruitment and review of Group Leaders and Fellows (Zarixia Zavala-Ruiz), Conferences Programs (Janine Stevens), the Visiting Scientist Program (Zavala-Ruiz), Student and Postdoctoral Programs (Erik Snapp), Shared Support Teams (Reed George), Gene-Targeting and Transgenics (Caiying Guo), and Project Teams (Wyatt Korff).
Spruston’s lab explores the role of the hippocampus in learning and memory, with an emphasis on the properties of a diverse collection of cell types and how they come together to form a circuit that mediates the learning and recall of episodic memories.
Spruston obtained a B.Sc. degree in Physiology from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada (1981-85) and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, USA (1985-91). He did postdoctoral studies at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Germany (1992-95) and then spent 16 years on the faculty at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, USA (1995-2011) before moving to Janelia.
