Prof. Michael Dolan, brain immunology expert, elected a FENS-Kavli Scholar

Posted on: 06 July 2026

The multidisciplinary, international network of FENS-Kavli Scholars is self-organised and aims to improve neuroscience in Europe and beyond through scientific exchange, advocacy, and outreach. FKNE Scholars participate in several meetings per year on a range of topics across neuroscience. They then put their ideas into action, for example through opinion articles and white-paper recommendations to European stakeholders on funding schemes and other key issues, as well as driving public engagement.

Prof. Dolan, who is also a European Research Council Starting Grant recipient, said: “Being selected as a 2026 FENS-Kavli Scholar is a tremendous honour. It provides an opportunity to engage with an exceptional community of neuroscientists at a pivotal stage in my career, and to share ideas across disciplines that are increasingly essential for understanding the complexity of brain-immune interactions.”

“My research focuses on how the brain’s immune system contributes to health, disease, and repair, with a particular emphasis on microglia, the resident immune cells of the brain. Once thought to be a relatively uniform population, microglia are now known to be far more diverse, with different subtypes that emerging in response to development, injury, aging, and neurodegeneration.

“While these discoveries have revealed a new level of cellular complexity in the brain, we still do not understand how these subtypes are formed, how they are maintained, or what precise functions they serve.”

Prof. Dolan and his lab team aim to address this gap by systematically dissecting how microglial subtypes arise and how they influence brain degeneration and repair. A central goal is to move beyond descriptive atlases of microglial diversity toward a mechanistic understanding that can explain, and ultimately enable control of, microglial function in neurological diseases.

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