Dr. Shailesh Kumar has been serving as a program officer in the Division of Neuroscience and Behavior at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) since 2020. Dr. Kumar’s portfolio includes basic, translational, and clinical research on sleep, circadian rhythms, and alcohol use disorders (AUDs) as well as other comorbid conditions. Before joining NIAAA, he worked as a Staff Scientist at the intramural Systems Biology Unit at NHLBI, where his research provided insights into the mechanisms, cellular functions, and genetic networks underlying sleep and circadian rhythms. Dr. Kumar’s specialized knowledge includes molecular and neurogenetics, statistical genetics, genomics, transcriptional regulation, and multi-dimensional phenotypic characterization. Dr. Kumar is an active member of trans-NIH Sleep Research Coordinating Research Committee (SRCC) and has contributed to the development of the NIH Sleep Research Plan which has been approved and signed by Congress.

Dr. Kumar earned his PhD in Genetics from Jawaharlal Nehru Center for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), Bangalore, followed by a post-doctoral fellowship at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of Pennsylvania under the mentorship of Prof. Amita Sehgal. Some of his key scientific contributions are uncovering the neurogenetic basis of nighttime arousal, linking steroid signaling to the molecular circadian clock function, inverted-U shape relationship between sleep duration and learning/memory and identification of novel molecules involved in sleep onset.