Joseph Takahashi, Ph.D.
Professor & Chair

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Joseph S. Takahashi is Chair of the Department of Neuroscience and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at UT Southwestern Medical Center. He currently holds the Loyd B. Sands Distinguished Chair in Neuroscience. Before moving to UT Southwestern, Dr. Takahashi was the Walter and Mary Elizabeth Glass Professor in the Life Sciences at Northwestern University. During his 26-year tenure at Northwestern, he held appointments as professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Physiology on the Evanston campus and professor in the Department of Neurology at Northwestern University Medical School. In addition, he was also the director of the Center for Functional Genomics.

Dr. Takahashi received a BA in biology from Swarthmore College in 1974 and a PhD 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.

He is the author of more than 300 scientific publications and the recipient of many awards including the Honma Prize in Biological Rhythms Research, NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, Searle Scholars Award, Bristol-Myers Squibb Unrestricted Grant in Neuroscience, and the C. U. Ariens Kappers Medal. He received the W. Alden Spencer Award in Neuroscience from Columbia University in 2001, was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000, a Member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2003 and a Member of the National Academy of Medicine in 2014. He received the Gruber Neuroscience Prize at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in 2019.

Dr. Takahashi has served on a number of advisory committees for the National Institutes of Health, as well as scientific advisory boards for Eli Lilly and Company, Bristol-Myers Squibb Neuroscience Committee, 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, and the Restless Legs Syndrome Foundation. 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.). He is a co-founder of Synchronicity Pharma., a biotech company that works on the role of clocks in metabolism and cancer.

He is on the Editorial Boards for PNAS, eLife, J Biol Rhythms, Neurobiology of Sleep and Circadian Rhythms, Genes, Brain and Behavior, and Section Head, Animal Genetics, Biology Reports Ltd., Faculty of 1000.  

Undergraduate

Swarthmore College (1974), Biology

Graduate School

University of Oregon (1981), Biology

• Aging and longevity
• Circadian Biology
• Circadian clocks and parasites
• Genetic Dissection of Behavior
• Molecular Neuroscience
• Mouse Genetics and Genomics
• Oscillator dynamics

Featured Publications

NPAS4 regulates the transcriptional response of the suprachiasmatic nucleus to light and circadian behavior.

Xu P, Berto S, Kulkarni A, Jeong B, Joseph C, Cox KH, Greenberg ME, Kim TK, Konopka G, Takahashi JS, Neuron 2021 Aug

Importance of circadian timing for aging and longevity.

Acosta-Rodríguez VA, Rijo-Ferreira F, Green CB, Takahashi JS, Nat Commun 2021 05 12 1 2862

Dual-Color Single-Cell Imaging of the Suprachiasmatic Nucleus Reveals a Circadian Role in Network Synchrony.

Shan Y, Abel JH, Li Y, Izumo M, Cox KH, Jeong B, Yoo SH, Olson DP, Doyle FJ, Takahashi JS, Neuron 2020 10 108 1 164-179.e7

Epigenetic inheritance of circadian period in clonal cells.

Li Y, Shan Y, Kilaru GK, Berto S, Wang GZ, Cox KH, Yoo SH, Yang S, Konopka G, Takahashi JS, Elife 2020 05 9

The malaria parasite has an intrinsic clock.

Rijo-Ferreira F, Acosta-Rodriguez VA, Abel JH, Kornblum I, Bento I, Kilaru G, Klerman EB, Mota MM, Takahashi JS, Science 2020 05 368 6492 746-753

Noise-driven cellular heterogeneity in circadian periodicity.

Li Y, Shan Y, Desai RV, Cox KH, Weinberger LS, Takahashi JS, Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 2020 05 117 19 10350-10356

Sleeping sickness is a circadian disorder.

Rijo-Ferreira F, Carvalho T, Afonso C, Sanches-Vaz M, Costa RM, Figueiredo LM, Takahashi JS Nat Commun 2018 01 9 1 62

Mice under Caloric Restriction Self-Impose a Temporal Restriction of Food Intake as Revealed by an Automated Feeder System.

Acosta-Rodríguez VA, de Groot MHM, Rijo-Ferreira F, Green CB, Takahashi JS Cell Metab. 2017 Jul 26 1 267-277.e2

Transcriptional architecture of the mammalian circadian clock.

Takahashi JS Nat. Rev. Genet. 2016 Dec

Forward-genetics analysis of sleep in randomly mutagenized mice.

Funato H, Miyoshi C, Fujiyama T, Kanda T, Sato M, Wang Z, Ma J, Nakane S, Tomita J, Ikkyu A, Kakizaki M, Hotta-Hirashima N, Kanno S, Komiya H, Asano F, Honda T, Kim SJ, Harano K, Muramoto H, Yonezawa T, Mizuno S, Miyazaki S, Connor L, Kumar V, Miura I, Suzuki T, Watanabe A, Abe M, Sugiyama F, Takahashi S, Sakimura K, Hayashi Y, Liu Q, Kume K, Wakana S, Takahashi JS, Yanagisawa M Nature 2016 Nov 539 7629 378-383

 Featured Books

Handbook of Behavioral Neurobiology: Volume 12 Circadian Clocks

Takahashi, J.S., F.W. Turek and R.Y. Moore (Ed.) (2001). New York, Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishing

• Gruber Neuroscience Prize
  The Gruber Foundation, presented at the 2019 Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting (2019)
• National Academy of Medicine
  Member (2014)
• Outstanding Scientific Achievement Award
  Sleep Research Society (2012)
• National Academy of Sciences
  Member (2003)
• W. Alden Spencer Award
  College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University (2001)
• American Academy of Arts and Sciences
  Fellow (2000)
• 6th C.U. Ariens Kappers Award
  Netherlands Society for the Advancement of Natural Sciences, Medicine and Surgery (1995)
• Honma Prize in Biological Rhythms Research
  Honma Foundation of Life Sciences (1986)

• Howard Hughes Medical Institute (1997)