Investigating the Therapeutic Benefits of Social Touch

Dr. Abdus-Saboor studies how the nervous system senses touch and pain, mapping how signals travel from the body to the brain.

Dr. Ishmail Abdus-Saboor is an Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute and a Freeman Hrabowski Scholar at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He holds a PhD in cell and molecular biology from the University of Pennsylvania and completed postdoctoral research at Weill Cornell and Penn, studying under Profs. Ben Shykind and Wenqin Luo. His lab investigates how the nervous system encodes somatosensory experiences such as touch and pain, using cutting-edge tools to map body-to-brain signaling. Previously a Blutt Presidential Assistant Professor at Penn, Dr. Abdus-Saboor joined Columbia’s faculty in 2021 and earned tenure in 2025. He also teaches a popular undergraduate course on cell and molecular neurobiology each fall.