Areas of Specialty:
Circadian Clocks
Time Restricted Feeding
Genetic Interventions
Joseph S. Takahashi, PhD
Joseph Takahashi is the Loyd B. Sands Distinguished Chair in Neuroscience and Chair of the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. He joined UT Southwestern in 2009. His research interests are the molecular mechanism of circadian clocks, neuroscience and geroscience. Dr. Takahashi pioneered the use of genetics 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. His lab has highlighted the role of circadian clocks in the regulation of metabolism, aging and longevity.
Dr. Takahashi was born in Tokyo, Japan (US Citizen) and grew up in Burma, Italy and the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC. He graduated from Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, with a BA in Biology; did his graduate studies with Michael Menaker at UT Austin and University of Oregon, Eugene (PhD in 1981). He was Pharmacology Research Associate at the NIMH and joined the faculty of Northwestern University in 1983 until 2009. He is the author of more than 350 scientific publications and the recipient of many awards including the Honma International Prize in Biological Rhythms Research in 1986, Ariëns Kappers Medal in 1995, W. Alden Spencer Award in Neuroscience from Columbia University in 2001, Outstanding Scientific Achievement Award from the Sleep Research Society in 2012, and the Gruber Neuroscience Prize in 2019. He was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000, Member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2003, and Member of the National Academy of Medicine in 2014.
Takahashi has served on a number of advisory committees for the National Institutes of Health, including the National Advisory Council on Aging, as well as 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, INSPIRE Servier International, the Restless Legs Syndrome Foundation, and the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing. He is/was a member of the editorial boards for PNAS, eLife, PLoS Genetics, Neuron, Curr Opin Neurobiol, Physiological Genomics, Aging Cell, Life Medicine, The Scientist, J. Biol. Rhythms, Genes Brain Behav, and H1 Connect, Faculty Opinions. He was also 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.), and was a co-founder of ReSet Therapeutics, Inc., a biotech company that worked on the role of clocks in metabolism and has been reincarnated as Synchronicity Pharma, Inc., which works on a new drug formulation to treat sleep disorders in autism spectrum disorder and other neurodevelopmental disorders.