Sandeep Robert (Bob) Datta is a professor in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. He received his M.D., Ph.D from Harvard University in 2004 and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University with Richard Axel, joining Harvard as a faculty member in 2009.

The goal of the Datta laboratory is to address how the brain extracts sensory information from the environment and converts that information into action. By studying and characterizing olfactory sensory and motor circuits in mice, the Datta laboratory aims to understand how neural codes for sensation and action are built and how they generate organized and goal-oriented behaviors, including both survival-based and social behaviors. To aid in these endeavors, Datta’s laboratory developed a method for characterizing the underlying structure of spontaneous or stimulus-evoked mouse behavior, called Motion Sequencing (MoSeq) (Wiltschko et al., Neuron, 2015) and made this compatible with neural-recording data (Markowitz et al., Cell, 2018).

The work of the Datta laboratory has important implications for a number of neurological disorders of the brain, including neurodegenerative diseases, motor disorders and autism spectrum disorders, and may lead to insight into not only these disorders but also disorders related to sensorimotor coupling.