Ishmail Abdus-Saboor is associate professor of biological sciences at Columbia University and principal investigator at Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute. He is also a Freeman Hrabowski Scholar at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Since opening his lab in 2018, he and his team have focused on how the nervous system encodes pain and social touch based on sensory stimuli applied to the skin. His lab uses both mice and naked mole-rats, integrating the peripheral and central nervous systems, seeking to uncover genes and neural circuits for somatosensation from the skin to the spinal cord and interconnected networks across the brain. The team is working to elucidate the “skin-brain axis”—taking a wholistic approach that combines high-resolution behavioral mapping, brain imaging and neural circuit manipulations.
Abdus-Saboor earned his B.S. in animal science at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University and his Ph.D. in cell and molecular biology at the University of Pennsylvania.
