Amita Sehgal

Dr. Amita Sehgal is the John Herr Musser Professor of Neuroscience at University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. Sehgal's major goal is to understand the molecular and cellular basis of behavior. Her studies are done largely with the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, and are directed, in part, toward understanding the endogenous mechanisms that confer a circadian (~24-hour) periodicity on many behaviors and physiological processes. She also uses a Drosophila model to understand how and why the need to sleep is generated. Sehgal has identified genes and neural networks that drive sleep in flies. Her findings meant that scientists could use Drosophila melanogaster, the genetically tractable fruit fly, to study sleep in humans. Sleep is absolutely essential for fruit flies and the sleeping species they model. Sehgal says, "In all animals, where the experiment has been done, if you don't allow them to sleep, they die." Nobody knows why. But Sehgal and colleagues are trying to break sleep down into its molecular and cellular components. They also study how an organism's sleep cycle falls into its circadian rhythm—the inherent daily cycle of physiological processes including sleep, metabolism, and blood flow. Using the fruit fly model, Sehgal and her colleagues have found that specific genes, called clock genes, control circadian rhythms. They discovered the timeless gene in flies and showed that it synchronizes the organism's 24-hour physiological cycle with environmental cues—in this case, daylight. Sehgal’s ongoing research is focused on breaking down the biochemical and physiological bases of circadian processes and of sleep as they relate to both the fruit fly and to humans. Sehgal is the recipient of numerous awards for her work; these include the University of Pennsylvania Michael Brown Junior Faculty as well as Stanley Cohen Senior Faculty Research Awards, appointment as an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Outstanding Scientific Achievement Award from the Sleep Research Society and election to the National Academy of Medicine.  Her articles appear in publications such as Cell, Nature, Neuron, and Science.