Ishmail Abdus-Saboor is an associate professor of biological sciences at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute. The Abdus-Saboor lab seeks to uncover encoding principles for pain and touch sensations by linking animal behavior to genes and neural circuits. Dr. Abdus-Saboor received his Ph.D. in Cell and Molecular Biology at the University of Pennsylvania with Meera Sundaram. Following training in developmental genetics, he moved into sensory neuroscience as a postdoc at Cornell and back at the University of Pennsylvania, with Benjamin Shykind and Wenqin Luo, respectively. Ishmail has received many prestigious honors including an NIH K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award and Burroughs Wellcome Fund PDEP Fellowship and has recently been named a Rita Allen Foundation Scholar (Award in Pain) and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow.