Amar Sahay is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, a James and Audrey Foster MGH research scholar, a principal faculty member of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, and an associate member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. Sahay earned his bachelor’s degree from Bennington College and performed undergraduate research at Rockefeller University. After a year studying signal transduction in Yosef Yarden’s laboratory at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Sahay earned his doctorate from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he investigated the role of secreted semaphorins in neural circuit formation and synaptic transmission in the laboratories of Alex Kolodkin and David Ginty. Following postdoctoral research interrogating the role of adult hippocampal neurogenesis in memory in Rene Hen’s laboratory at Columbia University, Sahay established his own laboratory to investigate how hippocampal circuit and plasticity mechanisms may be harnessed to rejuvenate, reengineer and repair memory and emotion circuits in adulthood and during aging. Sahay is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Institutes of Health Pathway to Independence Award, Ro1s (National Institute of Mental Health, National Institute on Aging), the Ellison New Scholar in Aging Award, NARSAD Young Investigator and Independent Investigator grants, the Whitehall Foundation Award, a Harvard Stem Cell Institute grant, the Inscopix Decode Award, an Alzheimer’s Association grant, and career development awards from the Society for Neuroscience and the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology. Sahay’s research has been published in Nature, Neuron, Nature Medicine, Nature Neuroscience, Nature Communications and Cell Reports. Sahay is committed to mentoring, and his trainees have been awarded NARSAD Young Investigator grants for postdoctoral fellows, HHMI Gilliam fellowships and the Hoopes Prize (Harvard College’s highest honor for an undergraduate thesis).
Projects:
Glial mechanisms by which sleep preserves cognitive function and plasticity in aging
Linking molecules, circuits and behavior to promote plasticity and memory in the aging brain