David Sabatini

Biography

Sabatini was appointed a Whitehead Fellow in 1997 after completing the MD/PhD program at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Sabatini was named an Associate Member at Whitehead and an Assistant Professor in the biology department at MIT in 2002.  He was appointed a Professor at MIT and a  Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator in 2008.

Research Interest

Whitehead Member David Sabatini studies the mechanisms that regulate cell growth. Spurred by the discovery of a cellular pathway that helps switch cell growth on and off, research in the Sabatini lab has linked growth to a cell’s ability to sense nutrients in its environment.This growth-triggering system, known as the TOR (target of rapamycin) pathway, is composed of a complex of proteins that respond to nutrient cues. Sabatini is working to identify TOR pathway components and study how they work and interact. His efforts to understand mammalian TOR at the cellular level have provided a new way to investigate the role nutrients and metabolism play in disease.