Dr. Michael Ward received his B.S. from Kenyon College in 1999 and M.D./Ph.D. degrees from Washington University in St. Louis. Following a neurology residency at UCSF, he sub-specialized in behavioral neurology and completed a postdoctoral fellowship studying mechanisms of frontotemporal dementia. In 2015 he joined the NIH as tenure track investigator, and became a Senior Investigator in 2022. Using iPSCs as a cellular model, his group studies the basic biology of neurodegeneration, with a goal of developing targeted, disease-modifying therapies. In addition, he co-directs the iPSC Neurodegenerative Research Initiative (iNDI), a large-scale effort to generate and phenotype iPSC models of neurodegeneration.