Principal Investigator
Dr. Heyward is an Assistant Professor in Internal Medicine, with a secondary appointment in Neuroscience, housed in the Center for Hypothalamic Research; he joined the UT Southwestern faculty in September of 2023.
The Heyward Lab’s core mission is to understand how neurotoxic insults caused by an obesogenic diet and aging contribute to epigenetically encoded, impairments in the properties of cell types in the brain that control appetite and body weight. This broad topic is studied by employing a combination of low-input cell-type specific, and single-cell multiomic, genome-wide assessments of gene expression, epigenetic modifications, chromatin accessibility, and transcription factor DNA binding dynamics, as well as mouse genetic and epigenome engineering tools, in vitro and in vivo assessments of transcription factor activation, and animal behavioral assessments.
Dr. Heyward completed his postdoctoral research fellowshiop, and became an Instructor in Medicine, at Harvard Medical School and the Endocrinology division at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), while working in the lab of Dr. Evan Rosen. During his postdoc he studied the transcriptional regulation of appetite during periods of hunger and leptin-mediated hunger-suppression. Dr. Heyward earned his PhD in Neurobiology from the University of Alabama at Birmingham while working with Dr. David Sweatt while investigating the epigenetic basis of obesity-induced cognitive impairment.
Outside of his scholarly pursuits, Dr. Heyward is also the active Founding Chair of the National Black Postdoctoral Association (501c3) and was the Founding Chair of the Harvard Medical School Black Postdoctoral Association (HBPA).