Harish C. Pant

With sadness, the MBL shares word of the passing of Harish Chandra Pant on December 22, 2023. He was a member of the MBL Society and the MBL flag will be lowered in his memory.

For close to 50 years, Pant was an investigator in neuroscience at the National Institutes of Health, retiring as Laboratory Chief and Senior Principal Investigator at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). He also conducted research in the MBL Whitman Center nearly every summer from 1974 to 2016 and taught in the MBL Physiology course in 1983.

Pant received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Physics from Agra University, Agra, India. His postdoctoral studies were conducted on the mechanisms of electron and ion transport in model membrane systems at the Department of Biophysics at Michigan State University. He joined the Laboratory of Neurobiology at the NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) as a senior staff fellow in 1974 with Ichiji Tasaki, where he studied the function of the axonal cytoskeleton in the squid giant axon. It was then that he began coming to the MBL for summer research.

In 1979 Pant moved to the NIH’s National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), extending his studies on the neuronal cytoskeleton and the effects of alcohol on its regulation. He moved to the NINDS, Laboratory of Neurochemistry in 1987 where was chief of the section on Cytoskeleton Regulation. His research was aimed toward understanding the molecular basis of neurodegeneration in diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and ALS, in particular the mechanisms regulating neuronal cytoskeletal phosphorylation in both health and disease.

An obituary published by his family is here.