Current Role
Dr. Takahashi is chair of the Department of Neuroscience and an Investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, Texas. He currently holds the Loyd B. Sands Distinguished Chair in Neuroscience
Expertise
Dr. Takahashi has pioneered the use of forward genetics and positional cloning in the mouse as a tool for discovery of genes underlying neurobiology and behavior, and his discovery of the mouse and human clock genes led to a description of a conserved circadian clock mechanism in animals.
Background
Before moving to UT Southwestern, Dr. Takahashi was the Walter and Mary Elizabeth Glass Professor in the Life Sciences at Northwestern University. In addition, he was also the director of the Center for Functional Genomics. He was a co-founder of Hypnion, Inc., a biotech discovery company in Worcester, Mass., that investigated sleep/wake neurobiology and pharmaceuticals (now owned by Eli Lilly and Co.) He has received numerous awards, including election to the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has served on several NIH advisory committees. Dr. Takahashi also has served on the scientific advisory boards for Eli Lilly and Company, the Genomics Research Institute for the Novartis Foundation, The Klingenstein Fund, the Searle Scholars Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the Allen Institute for Brain Science, the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, the Bristol-Myers Squibb Neuroscience Award Selection Committee, and the Restless Legs Syndrome Foundation. He is or was a member of the editorial boards for PNAS, eLife, PLoS Genetics, Curr. Opin. Neurobiol., J. Biol. Rhythms, Genes Brain Behav., Neuron, Physiol. Genomics, Neurobiol Sleep Circadian Rhythms, and the Faculty of 1000. Dr. Takahashi received a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of Oregon, Eugene and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institute of Mental Health.
