Edward Boyden

Edward Boyden
Boyden at the MIT Media Lab in 2018
Born	(1979-08-18) August 18, 1979 Plano, Texas
Alma mater	Stanford University MIT
Spouse	Xue Han
Awards	Perl-UNC Prize (2011) IET A F Harvey Prize (2011) The Brain Prize (2013) Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2016) Gairdner Foundation International Award (2018) Rumford Prize (2019) National Academy of Sciences (2019) Warren Alpert Foundation Prize (2019) Wilhelm Exner Medal (2020)
Scientific career
Institutions	MIT Bell Labs
Thesis	Task-specific neural mechanisms of memory encoding (2005)
Doctoral advisor	Jennifer Raymond Richard Tsien
Notable students	Deblina Sarkar Christian Wentz Kate Adamala

Edward S. Boyden is an American neuroscientist at MIT. He is the Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology, and a full member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. He is recognized for his work on optogenetics and expansion microscopy. Boyden joined the MIT faculty in 2007, and continues to develop new optogenetic tools as well as other technologies for the manipulation and analysis of brain structure and activity. He received the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.

Early life and education

Boyden was born in Plano, Texas. His mother has a masters in biochemistry and conducted nicotine research, staying home to tend to Boyden and his sister. His father was a management consultant. In childhood wanted to understand humanity, at first preferring math over science. He eventually pivoted to being interested in how our minds are capable of understanding math. As a young teenager, his thoughts resulted in what he now calls the "loop of understanding": Math is how we understand things at a deep level, our minds do math, the brain gives rise to our minds, biology governs our brains, chemistry implements biology, the principles of physics rule over chemistry, and physics run on math. It’s a loop from math to math, with all the knowledge in between.

Boyden won a statewide science fair in Texas at age 12 with a project in geometry.

At 14, Boyden attended the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science at the University of North Texas where he studied chemistry and mathematics alongside his high school coursework. There, he worked in Paul Braterman's lab examining the origins of life chemistry.

Boyden began his studies at MIT in 1995 at 16, skipping two grades. He earned a M.Eng. in electrical engineering and computer science in addition to two B.S. in electrical engineering and computer science and physics, graduating at age 19. Boyden worked in Neil Gershenfeld's group in quantum computing.

In 1999, Boyden began a PhD in neurosciences at Stanford University under the supervision of Jennifer Raymond and Richard Tsien. He completed it in 2005.

Career

Following his PhD, Boyden worked as a Helen Hay Whitney postdoctoral fellow in the departments of bioengineering, applied physics, and biology at Stanford University for a year. There, he worked with Mark Schnitzer and Karl Deisseroth to invent optical methods in neuroscience research. In 2006, he moved to MIT to work as a visiting scientist in the MIT Media Lab, leading the Neuroengineering and Neuromedia Group.

In 2007, Boyden established the Synthetic Neurobiology Group at MIT and also began working as an assistant professor in the MIT Media Lab and MIT Department of Biological Engineering. The next year, he became an assistant professor in the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

Boyden became an investigator at the MIT McGovern Institute in 2010. In 2013, he established the MIT Center for Neurobiological Engineering, which he now co-directs alongside Alan Jasanoff. He became an extramural member of the MIT Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research in 2017 before he was appointed the Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology at MIT a year later. 7 years after arriving at MIT, Boyden was awarded tenure as a full time professor.

In 2020, Boyden became an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The following year, he began co-directing the K. Lisa Yang Center for Bionics at MIT.

Research

Boyden's research encompasses optogenetics, expansion microscopy, deep brain stimulation, multiplexed imaging, and machine learning.

In optogenetics, a light-sensitive ion channel or pump such as channelrhodopsin-2 is genetically expressed in neurons, allowing neuronal activity to be controlled by light. There were early efforts to achieve targeted optical control dating back to 2002 that did not involve a directly light-activated ion channel, but it was the method based on directly light-activated channels from microbes, such as channelrhodopsin, emerging in 2005 that turned out to be broadly useful. Optogenetics in this way has been widely adopted by neuroscientists as a research tool, and it is also thought to have potential therapeutic applications.

Entrepreneurship

Main article: List of Edward Boyden patents

Boyden has nearly 300 patented inventions, including a steerable surgical stapler, methods and apparatus for neuromodulation, expansion microscopy, and light-activated proton pumps.

Boyden is the co-founder of Elemind, a neurotechnology company that augments sleep, attention, and the human experience. Elemind launched its neurotech headband that employs brainwaves to treat sleep disorders, long-term pain, and tremors on June 4, 2024.

He also co-founded Cognito Therapeutics, a company developing therapeutics designed to improve the lives of patients living with neurodegenerative disease. Specifically, Boyden aims utilize findings about sensory stimulation evoking gamma activity in Alzheimer's disease to slow its progression.

Boyden co-founded Expansion Technologies, aiming to enable the early disease detection by utilizing their novel super-resolution imaging method that physically expands samples, as well as Synlife, which innovates therapeutic platforms through bottom-up engineering of synthetic cells with a focus on the encapsulation of enzyme pathways.

Boyden is the scientific advisor of E11 Bio, a nonprofit project focused on neurotechnology development with a focus on brain circuit mapping.

He is the head of advisory board at Inner Cosmos whose mission is to heal depression with their Digital Pill, a penny-sized implant rebalancing brain networks with microstimulations.

Personal life

At Stanford, Boyden met his wife Xue Han, a neuroscientist at Boston University. They are raising two children together.

Awards

In 2008 Boyden was named by Discover Magazine as one of the top 20 scientists under 40. In 2006, he was named to the MIT Technology Review TR35 as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35. In 2013 he shared the Jacob Heskel Gabbay Award for Biotechnology and Medicine with Karl Deisseroth and Gero Miesenböck.

On November 29, 2015, Edward Boyden was one of five scientists honored with the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, awarded for “transformative advances toward understanding living systems and extending human life.”

He has received the 2015 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Biomedicine, jointly with Karl Deisseroth and Gero Miesenböck, for the development of optogenetics, the most unique technique for studying the brain today. In 2018, Boyden won the Canada Gairdner Foundation International Award, jointly with Karl Deisseroth and Peter Hegemann. In 2019, he was awarded the Rumford Prize for "extraordinary contributions related to the invention and refinement of optogenetics," with Ernst Bamberg, Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann, Gero Miesenböck, and Georg Nagel. In the same year, he, Deisseroth, Hegemann, and Miesenböck won the Warren Alpert Foundation Prize.

He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2019. In 2020, Boyden was awarded with the Wilhelm Exner Medal, for his work on expansion microscopy.

External links

• Ed Boyden's personal home page
• Boyden lab webpage
• Boyden lab page at MIT McGovern Institute
• McGovern Institute for Brain Research
• Ed Boyden: A light switch for neurons Archived 2014-02-13 at the Wayback Machine at TED
• SPIE TV: Ed Boyden: Expansion microscopy -- A new tool in brain research