Michael Lazarus received his doctoral degree (Dr. rer. nat.) at the University of Würzburg in Germany. In 1999, he joined Prof. Osamu Hayaishi’s group at the Osaka Bioscience Institute with prestigious fellowships of the Takeda Science Foundation of Japan and the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation of Germany. He then moved to Harvard Medical School where, from 2002-2007, he was an Instructor in Prof. Clifford Saper’s Systems Neurobiology group to examine the differential role of prostaglandin E2 receptors in the regulation of fever by establishing transgenic mouse models with conditional expression of each receptor. In 2007, he returned to the Osaka Bioscience Institute, where he was a Senior Scientist and led a sleep research group in the Department of Molecular Behavioral Biology between 2007 and 2013. Dr. Lazarus is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Tsukuba and a Principle Investigator in the International Institute for Integrative Sleep Medicine (WPI-IIIS). 
Dr. Lazarus is interested how prostaglandin and adenosine receptors in the brain regulate responses such as sleep and thermoregulation to motivational, circadian, homeostatic, and allostatic inputs. He uses molecular approaches such as conditional knockout or knockin mice and engineering adeno-associated viral vectors for focal deletion experiments and neuronal tract tracing of central pathways.

Selected publications:

- Oishi Y, Xu Q, Wang L, Zhang BJ, Takahashi K, Takata Y, Luo YJ, Cherasse Y, Schiffmann SN, de Kerchove d’Exaerde A, Urade Y, Qu WM, *Huang ZL, *Lazarus M*. Slow-wave sleep is controlled by a subset of nucleus accumbens core neurons in mice. Nature Communications, doi: 10.1038/s41467-017-00781-4, 2017. *Corresponding author
- Oishi Y, Suzuki Y, Takahashi K, Yonezawa T, Kanda T, Takata Y, Cherasse Y, *Lazarus M*. Activation of ventral tegmental area dopamine neurons produces wakefulness through dopamine D2–like receptors in mice. Brain Structure & Function, 222:2907-2915, doi: 10.1007/s00429-017-1365-7, 2017. *Corresponding author
- McEown K, Takata Y, Cherasse Y, Nagata N, Aritake K, *Lazarus M. Chemogenetic inhibition of the medial prefrontal cortex reverses the effects of REM sleep loss on sucrose consumption. eLife, 5:e20269, 2016. *Corresponding author
- Lazarus M, Chen J-F, Urade Y, Huang Z-L. Role of the basal ganglia in the control of sleep and wakefulness. Curr Opin Neurobiol 2013; doi: 10.1016/j.conb.2013.02.001
- Lazarus M, Huang Z-L, Lu J, Urade Y, Chen J-F. How do the basal ganglia regulate sleep-wake behavior? Trends Neurosci 2012, 35: 723-732.
- Lazarus M, Shen HY, Cherasse Y, Qu WM, Huang ZL, Bass C, Winsky-Sommerer R, Semba K, Fredholm B, Boison D, Hayaishi O, Urade Y, Chen JF. Arousal effect of caffeine depends on adenosine A2A receptors in the shell of the nucleus accumbens. J Neurosci 2011, 31: 10067-10075. 
- Lazarus M, Yoshida K, Coppari R, Bass CE, Mochizuki T, Lowell BB, Saper CB. EP3 prostaglandin receptors in the median preoptic nucleus are critical for fever responses. Nat Neurosci 10(9), 1131-3 (2007).