Dr. Kevin Sanchez is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Division of Women’s Health. He also has a dual appointment as a research fellow at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Sanchez received his PhD in Pharmacology & Toxicology from the University of Texas at Austin.

During his PhD, Dr. Sanchez investigated sex differences in the neuroimmune system throughout the lifespan using in vivo models. For example, he led a project where single nuclei RNA sequencing was conducted on rat hippocampal tissue to assess age- and sex-dependent changes in their immune profiles. His transcriptomic data indicate that the brains of healthy, aged female rats present a less neurodegenerative profile than their aged male counterparts. This may be due to females having a greater bias towards an adaptive immune response.

Dr. Sanchez is also invested in research that evaluates the impacts of environmental exposures on health outcomes. As a graduate student, he participated in a collaborative project to determine whether perinatal exposure to polychlorinated biphenyls, a persistent environmental endocrine-disrupting chemical, would impact neuroimmune function and behavior during adolescence. Their results indicate that perinatal polychlorinated biphenyl exposure enhanced neuroinflammation and anxiety-like behaviors in adolescent male rats but not female rats.