Ed Boyden
Ed Boyden
Ed Boyden completed his undergraduate degrees in Physics and Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and a Master of Engineering at MIT. He completed PhD studies in Neuroscience at Stanford University. He joined MIT as an Assistant Professor in 2007 and is now a Professor in the Departments of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Media Arts and Sciences, and Biological Engineering, and an HHMI investigator.
Ed Boyden’s group at MIT develops tools for analyzing and engineering brain circuits. Driven by the goal of optical control of targeted neurons, in 2000 he and Deisseroth began to discuss using opsins to manipulate neural activity, and in early 2004 they established a collaboration with Nagel and Bamberg that led to a successful demonstration of opsin-mediated neural activation.
His group continues to introduce optogenetic tool classes into neuroscience, including halorhodopsins (2007) and bacteriorhodopsins (2010) for optical neural silencing. His lab optimizes these opsins for novel neuroscientific applications, and develops complementary technologies such as scalable neural recording technologies, expansion microscopy, which enables complex biological systems to be imaged with nanoscale precision; robotic methods for directed evolution that are yielding new synthetic biology reagents for dynamic imaging of physiological signals; novel methods of noninvasive focal brain stimulation; and new methods of nanofabrication using shrinking of patterned materials to create nanostructures with ordinary lab equipment. He distributes these tools as freely as possible to the scientific community, and also apply them to the systematic analysis of brain computations, aiming to reveal the fundamental mechanisms of brain function, and yielding new, ground-truth therapeutic strategies for neurological and psychiatric disorders.
The Brain Prize 2013 is also awarded to:
