Professor Zachary Knight

Zachary Knight is a Professor in the Department of Physiology at UCSF and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His lab studies the neural mechanisms that control homeostasis, including especially the regulation of hunger and thirst. Zack received his B.A. in Chemistry from Princeton University and his Ph.D. in Chemistry from UCSF. During his Ph.D. research in the lab of Kevan Shokat, Zack discovered some of the first selective inhibitors of PI3-kinase and mTOR. He then performed postdoctoral studies in physiology and neuroscience in the lab of Jeffrey Friedman at Rockefeller University, where he developed genetic methods for identifying neural cell types in the mouse brain. Zack returned to UCSF in 2012 to start his independent research group investigating the neurobiology of homeostasis.