David Sweatt New Chair of UAB Department of Neurobiology

J. David Sweatt, Ph.D., an internationally recognized expert on the biological mechanisms underlying learning and memory, has been named chair of the UAB (University of Alabama at Birmingham) Department of Neurobiology. He will succeed the department’s interim chair, John J. Hablitz, Ph.D., this February.

Posted on October 12, 2005 at 3:44 p.m.

BIRMINGHAM, AL — J. David Sweatt, Ph.D., an internationally recognized expert on the biological mechanisms underlying learning and memory, has been named chair of the UAB (University of Alabama at Birmingham) Department of Neurobiology. He will succeed the department’s interim chair, John J. Hablitz, Ph.D., this February.

 
  J. David Sweatt

A native of Montgomery, Ala., Sweatt, 44, is a professor of neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine, in Houston, where he has been a faculty member since 1989. He is director of Baylor’s Neuroscience Graduate Program, and from 1995 to 2004, chaired that school’s Neuroscience Ph.D. Program Curriculum Committee.

“David Sweatt is a highly accomplished, thoughtful and energetic researcher and teacher,” said Robert R. Rich, M.D., vice president and dean of the UAB School of Medicine. “His chosen field is one of the most exciting in bioscience today. We all look forward to many fine contributions to scholarship that will continue to emerge from UAB’s Department of Neurobiology under Dr. Sweatt’s leadership.”

Neurobiology is a joint health sciences department of the UAB schools of Medicine and Dentistry.

A neuroscientist by training and experience, Sweatt’s research focuses on signal transduction mechanisms in learning and memory. He has received numerous honors and awards for his research, which is funded by the National Institutes of Health, the American Health Assistance Foundation and others. These honors include the Klingenstein Award in the Neurosciences (1990), a National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression Independent Investigator Award (1998) and a Texas Advanced Technology Program Award (2000).

Additionally, Sweatt is an editor of the Journal of Neuroscience and several other scientific journals, and the author or co-author of numerous scholarly papers.

Sweatt received his Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry in 1981 from the University of South Alabama. He received his doctorate in pharmacology from Vanderbilt University in 1986. For the following three years, he was a research associate at Vanderbilt and then at Columbia University. At Columbia, he worked with Eric Kandel, M.D., who received the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.