Ed Boyden

Ed Boyden, Ph. D.

MIT Media Lab, Benesse Career Development Professor
MIT Media Lab Center for Human Augmentation, co-director
MIT Department of Biological Engineering, MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, joint professor
MIT McGovern Institute for Brain Research, MIT Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, associate member
MIT Computational and Systems Biology Initiative, MIT Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience Track, MIT Biophysics Program, faculty member
MIT Microsystems Technology Laboratories, affiliate member

Curriculum vitae / Resume
email esb@media.mit.edu

I lead the Synthetic Neurobiology Group at MIT. We are inventing new tools for analyzing and engineering brain circuits. We are devising technologies for controlling specific neural circuit elements, to understand their causal contribution to normal and pathological neural computations. Our inventions include 'optogenetic' tools we developed for activation and silencing of neural circuits with light, and noninvasive devices using novel physical principles to control neural activity. We are using our inventions to enable systematic approaches to neuroscience, revealing how entire neural circuits operate to generate behavior, and empowering new therapeutic strategies for neurological and psychiatric disorders. Our entrepreneurial approach to tackling clinically and philosophically important problems will hopefully yield a better understanding of the nature of human existence, and the ability to engineer improvements thereupon. We have been featured in over 100 major news items related to our work and to prizes/awards we have won for our work.

IMPORTANT NOTE:
I will probably only update The Synthetic Neurobiology Group web page from now on.

Technologies for controlling neural circuit dynamics

Lentivirus production protocol for in vivo neural gene targeting	Millisecond-timescale optical control of neural dynamics in the nonhuman primate brain	Simple hardware platforms for bi-directional optical control of neurons and excitable cells	Multiple-color optical activation, silencing, and desynchronization of neural activity ("optogenetics"), with halorhodopsin (Halo, NpHR) and Channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR2)	Millisecond-timescale optical activation of neurons with ChR2 ("optogenetics")

OpenStim Noninvasive Brain Stimulator - open transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)
Blog	Classes			Inventions

My Blog, hosted by Technology Review	Neurotechnology Ventures MAS.883 / 9.455 / 15.128 / 20.454 (Fall 2008)	Principles of Neuroengineering MAS.881 / 9.422 / 20.452 (Fall 2008)		Medical devices, information technologies, and uses for physics

Task-specific neural mechanisms of memory encoding


Selective engagement of plasticity mechanisms for motor memory storage	Differential generalization of oppositely-directed learned changes	Distributed plasticity for information encoding	Mechanistic interaction of old and new encoded memories

The physics of computation, and the computation of physics


3D mouse interface using electric fields and OpenGL	Tabletop NMR quantum computing (Master's thesis)	FPGA-based RF tag reader (Master's thesis)	Tree-based machine learning for violin physics simulation	Control software for the MIT ORCA autonomous submarine

MEMS accelerometer using quantum tunneling	A physics-based animation engine	'Everything I learned at MIT'

Photographs from selected adventures


Southwest U.S., 2001	Thailand, 2002	Point Reyes, CA, 2002, 2003	Monterey, CA	Mendocino, CA, 2003

San Juan Islands, Seattle, WA, 2003	Patagonia, Chile, 2004	Kauai, Hawaii, 2006

Useful resources

Conversion Factors, Material Properties and Constants