A 1978 Harvard graduate, Todd Sacktor completed his M.D. at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and his neurology residency at Columbia University, where he began studying the role of the enzyme protein kinase C (PKC) in the short-term memory of Aplysia (marine snails).

In 1990, Sacktor established his own laboratory at the SUNY Downstate Medical Center, where he discovered a brain-specific form of PKC called PKMzeta. In 2002, his lab demonstrated that PKMzeta was both necessary and sufficient for maintaining long-term potentiation—the leading candidate mechanism for memory in the brain.  Five years ago, Sacktor and his colleagues uncovered PKMzeta’s impact in maintaining the brain’s long-term memory trace. As recently as 2011, research has shown that decreasing PKMzeta activity disrupts previously stored long-term memories and increasing PKMzeta activity enhances them. 

In 2006, the editors of Science highlighted Sacktor’s work on PKMzeta and memory as one of the top ten “Breakthroughs of the Year.” In 2009, his contributions were featured on the front page of The New York Times. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Physiology, Pharmacology, and Neurology at SUNY Downstate.

Blog Posts

• The Biological Mechanism That Gives Life Meaning

  As the title of our program The Unbearable Lightness of Memory suggests, memory is much more than the process by which we recall errands or birthdays. Memory—how information obtained from experience is stored in the brain—is also the mechanism that molds our sense of the world. As Homo sapiens, we inherited a basic neural circuitry for processing information about our environment. This circuitry, laid down by the instructions in our DNA, endows us with instinctual human behaviors as well as innate emotional predispositions and cognitive capabilities. But it is devoid of content. All of the specific information that forms an individual mind is learned and then maintained in memory. Read »