Sahib Khalsa

American clinician-researcher (MD, PhD). Director of Clinical Studies at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research in Tulsa since 2015, with a joint position at the University of Tulsa's Oxley College of Health Sciences. Bachelor's from SUNY Stony Brook (2002); MD and PhD in neuroscience from the Medical Scientist Training Program at the University of Iowa (2009); psychiatry residency at UCLA (2013), where he served as Chief Resident in the Anxiety Disorders Clinic. Convener of the 2016 Interoception Summit and lead author of the 2018 Roadmap that gave the field its current consensus vocabulary.

Stake§

Khalsa's stake is field-organisational and clinical-translational. The Roadmap is the document the field needed and the convening of the summit was his initiative; the institute's interoception programme is his to direct. The William K. Warren Foundation funding gives LIBR longer time-horizons than typical NIH grants allow, which is part of why the institute can run the kind of field-coordinating activity the Roadmap represents. His own empirical work concentrates on cardiovascular, respiratory, and gastrointestinal interoception across anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and addiction populations.

Khalsa's research line uses pharmacological and mechanosensory probes — isoproterenol to elevate heart rate, controlled respiratory challenges, gastric balloon distension — combined with interoceptive-detection tasks and fMRI to investigate how psychiatric populations differ from controls on body-state perception. The methodological commitment is to push beyond the single-channel heartbeat-detection paradigm into a wider range of interoceptive modalities, and to combine subjective and objective measurement so that the metacognitive dimension can be disambiguated from sensibility and accuracy.

The Roadmap convening reflects Khalsa's institutional position. LIBR in 2016 had the resources (the Warren Foundation funding allows longer-time-horizon work than NIH funding alone), the imaging infrastructure, and the network into both the clinical-psychiatry and the cognitive-neuroscience communities to host the summit; the twenty-four-author Roadmap that resulted is a field-coordinating artefact that emerged specifically from that institutional capacity. The pre-2018 interoception literature had been growing rapidly without unified nomenclature; the post-2018 literature uses Khalsa and colleagues' vocabulary.

Khalsa is the figure who built the clinical-translation hub for the contemporary interoception field — a careful methodologist, a deliberate field-organiser, less of a theoretical voice than Barrett or Seth and more of an empirical infrastructure builder. The Roadmap is the artefact; the LIBR programme is the ongoing work.