David Sabatini is a Member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Senior Associate Member at The Broad Institute MIT, and Member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, as well as Associate Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was also recently named an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

David and his lab at the Whitehead Institute study the basic mechanisms that regulate cell growth, the process whereby cells and organisms accumulate mass and increase in size. These pathways are often deranged in human diseases, such as diabetes and cancer. His current focus is on a cellular system called the Target of Rapamycin (TOR) pathway, a major regulator of growth in many eukaryotic species. In addition to his work on growth control, David is developing and applying new technologies that facilitate the analysis of gene function in mammalian cells. He has developed ‘cell-based microarrays’ that allow one to examine the cellular effects of perturbing the activity of thousands of genes in parallel. David is a founding member of The RNAi Consortium (TRC) of labs in the Boston area that is developing and using genome-scale RNA interference (RNAi) libraries targeting human and mouse genes.

David received his B.S. from Brown University magna cum laude and his M.D./Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1997 in the lab of Dr. Solomon H. Snyder in the Department of Neuroscience. Later in the same year, David was appointed a Whitehead Fellow at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. This was followed in 2002 by a dual appointment to Member at the Whitehead and Assistant Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. David has received a number of distinctions, including being named a W. M. Keck Foundation Distinguished Young Scholar, a Pew Scholar, a TR100 Innovator, and most recently, the 2009 Paul Marks Prize.