Yogesh (Yogi) Wairkar, Ph.D., is a program director in the Division of Genetics and Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology. He oversees grants in the areas of transcriptional mechanisms, endocytosis, lysosomes, and related organelles.
Before joining NIH, Wairkar was an assistant professor at the University of Texas Medical Branch, where his lab worked toward understanding the failure of synaptic communication in neurodegenerative diseases. He’s a geneticist and cell biologist by training whose primary research focused on the development, maintenance, and degeneration of synapses—-the fundamental communication links in the nervous system.
Wairkar earned a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and completed his postdoctoral training at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.