Ed Boyden is the Benesse Career Development Professor of the MIT Media Lab, and he holds a joint appointment in the MIT Department of Biological Engineering. He leads the Synthetic Neurobiology Group and codirects the MIT Center for Human Augmentation. His lab broadly invents and applies novel tools for the analysis and engineering of brain circuits, with the goals of correcting the neural computations that are aberrant in neural disorders and augmenting normal cognition. For inventing a radical new way to precisely activate and silence neurons with brief pulses of light, he was named to the Technology Review TR35, and awarded the NIH Director's New Innovator Award and the Society for Neuroscience Research Award for Innovation in Neuroscience. He has several dozen patents or patents pending. He received his PhD in neurosciences while a Hertz fellow at Stanford University; there, he discovered new principles of how memories are stored. Before that, he earned multiple degrees from MIT in electrical engineering and physics.
