Your brain mediates everything that you sense, feel, think, and do. The brain is incredibly complex - each cubic millimeter of your brain contains perhaps a hundred thousand cells, connected by a billion synapses, each operating with millisecond precision. We develop tools that enable the mapping of the molecules and wiring of the brain, the recording and control of its neural dynamics, and the repair of its dysfunction. We distribute our 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.
News
- Boyden selected as Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator (5/23/2018)
- Congrats to Erica Jung, who accepted a tenure track faculty job at U. Illinois-Chicago. (5/22/2018)
- Congrats to Nikita Pak, Young Gyu Yoon, and David Rolnick for passing their PhD defenses. (5/15/2018)
- Boyden receives 2018 Canada Gairdner International Award (MIT News, 3/27/2018)
- Congrats to Deblina Sarkar for winning an NIH K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award. (3/6/2018)
- Boyden named inaugural Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology (MIT News, 3/5/2018)
- Nature Chemical Biology: In vivo fluorescent voltage imaging of neural activity (2/26/2018)
- A Neurobiologist Thinks Big — and Small (Quanta Magazine, 1/18/2018)
- Nature Neuroscience: Temporally precise single-cell optogenetics (11/13/2017)
- Disease Hunters Enlarge the Enemy to Get a Better Look (Scientific American, 8/1/2017)
- New Electrical Brain Stimulation Technique Shows Promise in Mice (New York Times, 6/1/2017)
- TED.com Talk on Expansion Microscopy (7/21/2016)
- World Economic Forum lecture on Engineering Revolutions (2/19/2016)
- Boyden awarded Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for Inventing Optogenetic Tools (New York Times, 11/8/2015)