Bernardo Sabatini, MD, PhD

Takeda Professor of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School

Bernardo Sabatini is the Takeda Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. He obtained a PhD from the Department of Neurobiology and MD from the Harvard/Massachusetts Institute of Technology Program in Health Sciences and Technology in 1999. Sabatini chose not to pursue further medical training, and instead began a postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Karel Svoboda at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. After his postdoctoral research, Sabatini joined the faculty in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School in 2001.

In 2008, Sabatini was named an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and in 2010 was named the Takeda Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. His laboratory focuses on understanding the function and regulation of synapses in the mammalian brain with a particular interest in how the function of synapses is perturbed in human diseases such as autism, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. Sabatini’s laboratory creates new optical and chemical methods to be able to observe and manipulate the biochemical signaling associated with synapse function.