Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

Sandeep Robert Datta P’26 is a professor in department of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. His lab focuses on understanding how sensory cues — particularly odors — are detected by the nervous system, and how the brain transforms information about the presence of salient sensory cues into patterns of motivated action. This work involves studying genes involved in detecting sensory information, revealing the patterns of neural activity deep in the brain that encode sensory maps of the outside world, and probing the fundamental statistical structure of behavior itself. His lab has developed AI-based technologies that allow researchers to understand how the brain builds body language and revealed why COVID-19 causes patients to lose their sense of smell. 

Datta has published numerous articles on his research in journals including Cell, Science and Nature, is a reviewer and an editor at multiple scientific journals, and is an Associate Member of the Broad Institute. Dr. Datta has received the NIH New Innovator Award, the Burroughs Welcome Career Award in the Medical Sciences, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the Searle Scholars Award, the Vallee Young Investigator Award, the McKnight Endowment Fund Scholar Award and has been named a fellow of the National Academy of Science/Kavli Scholars program. Datta has also co-founded or advised many neuroscience start-ups, including Neumora, Gilgamesh Therapeutics, Osmo, Tenvie and Axiom Labs.

A graduate of Yale College, Datta earned his M.D./Ph.D. at Harvard University, then worked as a postdoc with the Nobel laureate Richard Axel at Columbia, and joined the Harvard faculty in 2009.