Dr. Joseph Takahashi is Professor and Chairman of the UT Southwestern Department of Neuroscience and holds the Loyd B. Sands Distinguished Chair in Neuroscience. In 2014, he was elected to the Institute of Medicine (IOM), a component of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences (NAS), to which he was elected in 2003. He is also an Investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which is a philanthropic organization promoting biomedical research. Dr. Takahashi has pioneered the use of forward genetics and positional cloning in the mouse as a tool for the discovery of genes underlying neurobiology and behavior. He joined the faculty in 2009.