Edward Stuart Boyden

About

Edward Stuart Boyden is the Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology at MIT, an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and a faculty member of the MIT McGovern Institute for Brain Research. He leads the Synthetic Neurobiology Group, which develops tools for analyzing and repairing complex biological systems such as the brain. His work involves creating technologies including expansion microscopy for nanoscale imaging, optogenetic tools for neural activation and silencing with light, robotic methods for directed evolution to generate new synthetic biology reagents, noninvasive focal brain stimulation techniques, and nanofabrication methods using shrinking of patterned materials. He co-directs the MIT Center for Neurobiological Engineering and is involved with several other research centers at MIT. Boyden's research aims to systematically analyze brain circuits, reveal fundamental mechanisms of brain function, and develop ground-truth therapeutic strategies for neurological and psychiatric disorders. His background includes a Ph.D. in neurosciences from Stanford University, where he discovered that the molecular mechanisms used to store memory are determined by the content to be learned, and he co-invented optogenetic control of neurons. He studied chemistry at the Texas Academy of Math and Science and earned degrees in electrical engineering, computer science, and physics from MIT. His long-term goal is to understand how the brain generates the mind to provide a…

Research topics

• Biology
• Computer Science
• Neuroscience
• Genetics
• Physics
• Chemistry
• Cell biology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computational biology
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Autism genes converge on asynchronous development of shared neuron classes

  Nature · 2022 · 454 citations

  DOI

• Expansion sequencing: Spatially precise in situ transcriptomics in intact biological systems

  Science · 2021 · 411 citations

  Methods for highly multiplexed RNA imaging are limited in spatial resolution and thus in their ability to localize transcripts to nanoscale and subcellular compartments. We adapt expansion microscopy, which physically expands biological specimens, for long-read untargeted and targeted in situ RNA sequencing. We applied untargeted expansion sequencing (ExSeq) to the mouse brain, which yielded the readout of thousands of genes, including splice variants. Targeted ExSeq yielded nanoscale-resolution…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Multisensory gamma stimulation promotes glymphatic clearance of amyloid

  Nature · 2024 · 287 citations

  . Here we show that multisensory gamma stimulation promotes the influx of cerebrospinal fluid and the efflux of interstitial fluid in the cortex of the 5XFAD mouse model of Alzheimer's disease. Influx of cerebrospinal fluid was associated with increased aquaporin-4 polarization along astrocytic endfeet and dilated meningeal lymphatic vessels. Inhibiting glymphatic clearance abolished the removal of amyloid by multisensory 40 Hz stimulation. Using chemogenetic manipulation and a genetically encod…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• In situ genome sequencing resolves DNA sequence and structure in intact biological samples

  Science · 2021 · 209 citations

  Understanding genome organization requires integration of DNA sequence and three-dimensional spatial context; however, existing genome-wide methods lack either base pair sequence resolution or direct spatial localization. Here, we describe in situ genome sequencing (IGS), a method for simultaneously sequencing and imaging genomes within intact biological samples. We applied IGS to human fibroblasts and early mouse embryos, spatially localizing thousands of genomic loci in individual nuclei. Usin…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• All-Optical Electrophysiology Reveals the Role of Lateral Inhibition in Sensory Processing in Cortical Layer 1

  Cell · 2020 · 163 citations

  DOI

Recent grants

• CAREER: A Neurophotonic Platform for Causal Brain Analysis

  NSF · $400k · 2011–2016

• High throughput assaying of circuit activity and connectivity in brain organoids

  NIH · $2.5M · 2020–2024

• NIH Grant R01GM104948

  NIH · $4.4M · 2018

Frequent coauthors

• Ruixuan Gao

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  172 shared

• Kiryl D. Piatkevich

  Westlake University

  170 shared

• Asmamaw T. Wassie

  University of Pennsylvania

  159 shared

• Craig R. Forest

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  157 shared

• Ilya Kolb

  Janelia Research Campus

  147 shared

• Anubhav Sinha

  McGovern Institute for Brain Research

  134 shared

• William Stoy

  Columbia University

  126 shared

• Shahar Alon

  Bar-Ilan University

  125 shared

Labs

• Synthetic Neurobiology GroupPI

Awards & honors

• Wilhelm Exner Medal (2020)
• Croonian Medal (2019)
• Lennart Nilsson Award (2019)
• Warren Alpert Foundation Prize (2019)
• Rumford Prize (2019)

Similar researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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• Mark Bearh-152
• Ann M.Graybielh-148