Assistant VP for Research (Natural Sciences and Engineering) and Director of the Office of National Laboratories; Professor, Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology
About
Monica Dus is Assistant Vice President for Research at the University of Michigan, where she helps lead the university’s research portfolio and directs the Office of National Laboratories. In these roles, she advances research partnerships and institutional strategy spanning AI for science, quantum, biosecurity and biomanufacturing, energy, space, advanced manufacturing, and national security. She is also Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology and leads the Laboratory of Molecular Nutrition in LSA.
Dus’s work focuses on how public research universities can build national capability by linking discovery to technology, industry, workforce, and public purpose. From 2023 to 2024, she served as a White House Fellow and Special Assistant to the 78th Secretary of the Navy, leading science, education, and force-resilience portfolios in the Secretary’s immediate office. She contributed to Navy science and technology and education strategy and helped develop a $50 million cross-sector Michigan workforce initiative supporting the submarine industrial base. She was recognized with the Navy Superior Civilian Service Award.
A molecular biologist by training, Dus studies how food-derived signals shape gene expression, brain function, physiology, and behavior. Her NIH- and NSF-funded laboratory combines genetics, neuroscience, and metabolism to understand how nutrition communicates with cells and organisms across the life course. She teaches molecular genetics, neuroscience, and science communication at Michigan and writes for public audiences about nutrition, genetics, and the brain.
Dus is a Guggenheim Fellow and a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s New Voices cohort. She serves on the AAAS Vision for American Science and Technology task force, the board of the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research, and the NIH National Taste and Smell Center. Her forthcoming trade book, Newtrition, is under contract with Scribner and Allen Lane UK.
She earned her Ph.D. in molecular biology from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and completed postdoctoral training in neurobiology at New York University.
