Bernardo Sabatini, M.D., Ph.D.

Bernardo Sabatini obtained a Ph.D. from the Department of Neurobiology and his M.D. degree from the Harvard/Massachusetts Institute of Technology program in Health Sciences and Technology in 1999. Dr. Sabatini chose to not pursue further medical training, and instead began a postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Dr. Karel Svoboda at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. After his postdoctoral research, Dr. Sabatini joined the faculty in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School in 2001. In 2008, Dr. Sabatini was named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and, in 2010, was named the Takeda Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. His laboratory focuses on understanding the structure and function of the basal ganglia mammalian brain. The group has a particular interest in how this circuit mediates the processed of action selection (what should we do next?), action evaluation (was it a good choice?) and action plan updating (should we do it action in the future?), as well as in how perturbations of the circuit contribute to disease. In order to conduct their studies, Dr. Sabatini’s laboratory creates new optical and chemical methods to be able to observe and manipulate the biochemical signaling associated with synapse and circuit function. Dr. Sabatini was recently appointed an inaugural co-director of the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence.