David M. Sabatini is an American scientist and Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as well as a member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. He has been an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 2008 and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2016. He is known for his important contributions in the areas of cell signaling and cancer metabolism, most notably the discovery and study of mTOR, a protein kinase that is an important regulator of cell and organismal growth that is deregulated in cancer, diabetes, as well as the aging process.