Joseph S. Takahashi is Chair of the Department of Neuroscience 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.