If you’ve ever had a class that didn’t just teach you something, but made you feel more human, that’s what it’s like to take a course with Dr. Michael “Flux” Caruso.
I first met Dr. Flux through his psychology classes at CU Boulder, and they ended up being some of the most meaningful experiences I’ve had in college. His classes felt less like “here’s the material, memorize it” and more like an invitation to actually think, feel, and question. So when I got the chance to sit down and talk with him, I wanted to know: How did he become this kind of professor?
What I got was not just a story about teaching, but about curiosity, mental health, resilience, and what it means to build a life in constant motion.
From Philadelphia Suburbs to “Flux”
Dr. Flux grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, in towns called Newtown Square and Broomall, in what he describes as a very “salt of the earth” family.
His dad, who didn’t go to college, worked in an office and later became a school bus driver and loved it. His mom became a hairdresser. Neither went the traditional academic route, but they poured what they had into him: opportunity, curiosity, and a lot of support, even when they didn’t always know what to do with a kid who wanted to build automatic seed planters for the third-grade “invention convention.”
“I think I was always a very curious kid,” he told me. His parents took him to museums, to New York to see family and Broadway shows, and into spaces where culture, art, and ideas were everywhere. At some point, they realized he was harder on himself than they could ever be, and they just…let him run. By high school, he was loading up on AP classes and essentially “running the show,” as he put it.
At the same time, he was raised in a strict religious environment as a Jehovah’s Witness, something that clashed hard with his growing fascination with science. He remembers getting obsessed with evolution as a kid, reading pamphlets about animal evolution and feeling the “intense cognitive dissonance” between what he was taught to believe and what his brain knew made sense. That tension between deep curiosity and rigid systems became one of the threads that shaped everything that came later.
A lot of his emotional intelligence, he says, came from his mom.
“She’s incredibly skilled at navigating social challenges and understanding people,” he explained. She never got the chance to pursue higher education, but the way she reasons through relationships is, as he told her, “very much like a scientist.” That blend of scientific curiosity and human insight became the foundation for who he is now: a psychologist who is just as interested in the brain as he is in the stories people tell about their lives.
From Molecules to Minds to Mental Health
If you assume he was always a psych major, you’d be wrong. His path to psychology was, in his words, “completely roundabout.”
Through high school, he was obsessed with physics and string theory. In college, he went into biotechnology and molecular biology, fascinated by tiny systems and complex interactions. His early research and even his first publication were about molecular mechanisms in autoimmune disease.
But then his own mental health forced its way into the story.
After college, he had his first major mental health break. Trying to understand his own brain and experience pushed him toward neuroscience. He entered an intense biomedical PhD program at NYU, rotated through labs studying epigenetics, birdsong, primate motor function, and visual systems, often working with animals and doing highly technical neural recordings.
And he hated it.
He was interested in the neuroscience of mental health and human experience, but found himself alone in rooms with monkeys pulling levers, feeling disconnected from the people he ultimately wanted to help. Three years in, another devastating mental health crash hit. He left with a master’s degree, moved back home, and took retail jobs at the mall while trying to figure out what came next.
That period, painful, confusing, and humbling, eventually pointed him toward clinical psychology, where the science of the brain and the reality of human suffering finally met. CU Boulder’s joint PhD program in clinical psychology and neuroscience became the place where all his threads came together.
There, he joined Dr. Chris Lowry’s lab, working at the intersection of the immune system, the brain, and mental health in a field called psychoneuroimmunology. His research explored how immune dysregulation can drive mental health problems and how novel treatments might help.
Ironically, the long, messy, terrifying journey of trying to understand his own mind left him uniquely positioned to understand new theories about his own condition, which may be a complex autoimmune process involving emotion-focused areas in the brain. “The driving force behind all of this was me just trying to figure out what to do with my mind,” he said. And in a strange full-circle twist, the science he helped build is now helping explain him.
The Performer Becomes a Professor
Teaching didn’t happen by accident, but it also wasn’t some neat, linear goal.
In New York, while in grad school, he fell into nightlife, performance, and body painting. He tried on stage names and personas and eventually chose “Flux” as a reminder to never be afraid of change. That name stuck, first in performance, then in science, and now in the classroom.
“I’ve always loved communicating,” he said. Public speaking, storytelling, explaining complex ideas. Those were the things that lit him up. He began giving illustrated presentations to research labs, turning scary-sounding immunology into funny, visual stories. He spoke at conferences for the float tank industry, using a fictional cavewoman named Clara being chased by a saber-toothed tiger to break down stress, the nervous system, and the immune response. The talks were a hit.
At some point, the realization clicked: I could do this as a teacher.
After finishing his PhD, he knew he needed time off for his mental health, so he moved back home, worked as a bartender, and, true to form, turned the bar into a low-key lecture hall. “On Saturdays, I’d be making margaritas and giving psychology lectures,” he joked. Eventually he got an email about teaching asynchronous continuing ed courses for CU Boulder and was asked to develop a class. He decided to do it “his way.”
That first course, he says, went “ridiculously well.” From there, he was given the opportunity to build Human Emotion. Then came the email from the psych department asking him to come and teach in person.
Building a Class Like Human Emotion
If you’ve heard anything about Dr. Flux on campus, it’s probably about Human Emotion, the class that manages to cover evolutionary theories of anger and love, cultural and gender differences, development, morality, the brain, and mental illness, all without feeling like a disjointed mess.
Creating it was nothing short of intense.
“It’s exhausting,” he admitted. “It’s like giving birth,” he joked. He reads constantly, sketches out structures, builds visuals, and writes scripts, all while asking: What actually matters for students? What will be useful to them as humans, not just test-takers?
One of the biggest choices he made was to bring himself into the course in a way he’d never done before.
As a clinician, he was trained not to center himself in the therapy room. But in the classroom, he realized that sharing parts of his own story, carefully and thoughtfully, actually helped students connect with the material and with one another. While workshopping one of his courses during a road trip, he noticed that the most effective way to get people to understand emotion was to use his own experiences as examples.
The challenge, he says, is figuring out “how to bring yourself into a course in a way that is instructive but not a burden.” He doesn’t want students to feel responsible for him or to turn class into a trauma dump. Instead, he chooses specific parts of his story that help illuminate a concept or create connection, then wraps them in clear learning goals.
Underneath it all, his classes rest on one core idea:
“All models are wrong, but some are useful.”
He uses this quote (from statistician George Box) as a framework for teaching resilience and flexibility. When it comes to emotions, there isn’t one “ultimate truth.” Different theories and models (biological, constructed, basic emotions) are all imperfect, but each can be useful in different contexts, just like the movie Inside Out, which doesn’t perfectly map neuroscience but gives people a simple, helpful way to think about feeling states.
What he really wants students to see is that the same is true about themselves.
Teaching in a Generation That’s Exhausted
One thing that stood out in our conversation was how deeply he understands what it feels like to be a student right now, especially a student whose mental health doesn’t fit neatly into a diagnosis or a label.
He talks openly about the amount of emotional energy it takes for some people just to exist, let alone show up to class, meet deadlines, and plan their futures. He sees patterns in this generation’s struggles that older generations often can’t recognize: emotional dysregulation, burnout, constant comparison, and the pressure to have a perfectly mapped-out life path in a world that’s basically unpredictable.
He doesn’t sugarcoat how hard it is.
“We are in one of the most volatile times in human history that I can think of,” he told me. AI, tech, unstable job markets, no one really knows what the next five years will look like, let alone ten. So when students ask him what to do after graduation, he doesn’t pretend to have a formula.
What he does believe in is flexibility, values, and skills that travel.
He encourages students to learn how to understand human behavior, build emotional awareness, and stay curious, because those tools will matter no matter what the job market looks like. He also normalizes taking time, stepping back, working “non-glamorous” jobs, and using that space to figure things out instead of rushing into something just because it sounds impressive.
A lot of this comes from his own story: working retail with a master’s in neuroscience, bartending after a PhD, starting over again and again. For him, those weren’t failures. They were pauses, pivots, and necessary chapters.
Advice for Students Who Feel “Behind”
When I asked what he’d say to psychology majors who feel lost, behind, or terrified of not having it all figured out by graduation, his answer landed hard.
He doesn’t believe in a single “correct” path anymore. The whole “go to school, get the degree, get the job, stay there forever” model belonged to a more stable world. Right now, we’re living in something else entirely, and that demands a different kind of mindset.
He emphasized:
- Be flexible. Be willing to try things, take steps sideways or backwards if you need to, and say yes to unexpected opportunities that align with who you are.
- Protect your energy. Constantly adapting is exhausting. You have to find ways to rest, unplug, and think clearly away from screens and noise.
- Stay values-driven. Whether it’s grad school, a job, or a random opportunity, he looks for people (and encourages students to become people) who are guided by curiosity, integrity, and prosocial values.
- Don’t let labels box you in. Whether it’s a diagnosis, a major, or a personality label, he wants students to use those words as tools, not cages. They can help explain things and guide strategy, but they shouldn’t be the reason you stop dreaming.
Ultimately, he hopes students leave his classes with a more flexible, compassionate way of understanding themselves. Not as a fixed identity with one story, but as something in, yes, flux.
Taking classes with Dr. Flux was genuinely one of the highlights of my time at CU Boulder. Even though both courses were online, they never felt distant or disconnected; if anything, they were some of the most engaging, thoughtful, and emotionally grounding classes I’ve ever taken. His lectures made complex ideas feel human, his discussions made you think differently about yourself and the world around you, and his way of teaching made you feel understood even through a screen. Having him as a professor left a lasting impact on me during a really difficult period of my life, and I’m truly grateful for the space he created for his students. His courses are the kind you carry with you long after the semester ends, and I genuinely encourage anyone who has the opportunity to take one. It’s an experience you don’t forget.