Joseph Takahashi, Ph.D.
Joseph Takahashi, Ph.D., is Chair of the Department of Neuroscience and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at UT Southwestern. He currently holds the Loyd B . Sands Distinguished Chair in Neuroscience. Dr. Takahashi received a B.A. in biology from Swarthmore College in 1974 and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of Oregon, Eugene, in 1981. For postdoctoral training, he was a pharmacology research associate at the National Institute of Mental Health from 1981–1983.
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.