Jose G Grajales-Reyes, MD, PhD

José G. Grajales-Reyes, MD, PhD is a physician-scientist, former Chief Resident, and Regional Anesthesiology and Acute Pain Medicine Fellow at Yale School of Medicine whose research explores how the brain coordinates physiological responses to pain, metabolism, inflammation, and disease. By integrating systems neuroscience, neuroimmunology, metabolism, and anesthesiology, his work seeks to define how neural circuits regulate whole-body physiology in health and disease.

Dr. Grajales-Reyes earned his MD and PhD in Neuroscience from Washington University in St. Louis, where he investigated the neural circuits underlying descending pain modulation and contributed to the development of wireless neurotechnologies for interrogating the nervous system. His work has been published in journals including Nature Biotechnology, Nature Communications, Nature Protocols, and Trends in Neurosciences.

At Yale, Dr. Grajales-Reyes conducts postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Marc Schneeberger, PhD, where he investigates how metabolic states remodel reward circuitry and neurovascular function using circuit-specific proteomics and systems neuroscience approaches. In parallel, through collaboration with Ruslan Medzhitov, PhD, he studies brain-body communication during systemic inflammation and has contributed to the discovery of a central neural pathway through which the brain can promote survival during inflammatory shock by restoring metabolic homeostasis.

Recognized for excellence in both research and clinical care, Dr. Grajales-Reyes is committed to bridging mechanistic neuroscience with anesthesiology. His long-term goal is to establish an independent physician-scientist program that translates discoveries in brain-body communication into innovative therapies for chronic pain, metabolic disease, addiction, and critical illness.