Professor Pankaj Sah, Director of the Queensland Brain Institute

Areas of responsibility

Professor Sah is Director of the Queensland Brain Institute (QBI), and is responsible for its strategic directions, scientific and associate appointments, budgets, performance, and representation and reporting to stakeholders. Professor Sah also heads a laboratory of 18 people, comprising ten Postdoctoral Fellows, four PhD students and four research support staff.

Biography

Professor Pankaj Sah is renowned for his work in understanding the physiology of excitatory synapses and synaptic plasticity in the amygdala, an area of the brain involved in emotional processing. He was recruited to QBI as a founding member in 2003, and was appointed as its Deputy Director (Research) in 2007. He has been Director of the Queensland Brain Institute since July 2015.

Previously, he was a group leader at the John Curtin School of Medical Research at the Australian National University, and a laboratory head in the Department of Physiology at the University of Newcastle.

His laboratory studies the amygdala using a combination of molecular tools, electrophysiology, anatomical reconstruction and calcium imaging. Recently, his laboratory has examined electrophysiological recordings in patients undergoing electrode implantation for deep brain stimulation, which is used to treat a variety of disorders such as Parkinson's disease, Tourette's syndrome and essential tremor.

Professor Sah has published over 110 papers in international peer-reviewed journals. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Nature Partnership Journal npj Science of Learning, the first journal to bring together the findings of neuroscientists, psychologists, and education researchers to understand how the brain learns.

Professor Pankaj Sah
Director of the Queensland Brain Institute
BMedSci UNSW, MBBS UNSW, PhD ANU

+61 (7) 3346 6311
+61 (7) 3346 6301
pankaj.sah@uq.edu.au
qbi.uq.edu.au

Room 638, Level 6
Queensland Brain Institute
Building 79, Upland Road
Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia

 

Ms Janet Voight
Executive Assistant

+ 61 (7) 3346 6311
+61 (7) 3346 6301
j.voight@uq.edu.au