Amar Sahay BA, PhD

Dr. Sahay is an associate professor at the Center for Regenerative Medicine and the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School. He is also principal faculty of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute of Harvard University. The incidence and complexity of mental illnesses and cognitive impairments associated with ageing and Alzheimer’s disease underscores the need to develop novel treatments.

The mission of the Sahay Lab is to generate fundamental insights into the functions of the dentate gyrus and the role of adult hippocampal neurogenesis, the process by which neural stem cells generate dentate granule neurons throughout life, in memory processing and modulation of mood. By integrating cellular, circuit, systems and behavioral level approaches, we aspire to rejuvenate and reengineer the hippocampus to optimize circuit performance and memory processing. We predict that this strategy will impact circuit-based endophenotypes shared across diseases such as PTSD, Alzheimer’s disease and age-related cognitive decline.