Ismail is an incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the University of Utah. He conducts research at the intersection of chemical biology and neuroscience. Specifically, he is interested in determining how neuropeptide signaling modulates behavior and physiology in the context of both health and disease. To this end, he is working on developing a suite of novel chemical and molecular tools that can track and manipulate neuropeptides in real-time.

By combining such bespoke tools with traditional pharmacological and behavioral analyses, he hopes to determine how neuropeptides modulate neural computations and, ultimately, how they drive complex maternal and social behaviors. Ismail is generously funded by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Awards at the Scientific Interface (CASI) and Postdoctoral Diversity Enrichment Program (PDEP) awards.