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 function and regulation of synapses in the mammalian brain with a particular interest in how the function of synapses is perturbed in human disease such as autism, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. 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 function.