TSC 2010 -KEYNOTE SPEAKER

PLENARY 6

Thursday, April 15, 2010  11:20am-12:45pm

LEO RICH THEATRE

Karl Deisseroth -

Optogenetics: new developments, new applications

Karl Deisseroth, M.D., Ph.D.
Stanford University, Dept. of Bioengineering

Karl Deisseroth, MD PhD, is Associate Professor of Bioengineering and Psychiatry at Stanford University (http://www.stanford.edu/group/dlab). Karl received his bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1992, his PhD from Stanford in 1998, and his MD from Stanford in 2000. He completed postdoctoral training, medical internship, and adult psychiatry residency at Stanford, and he was board-certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology in 2006. He is a faculty member in the Bioengineering and Psychiatry Departments at Stanford as well as in the interdisciplinary Bio-X and Neurosciences Programs.

Dr. Deisseroth has created optogenetics, a technology that uses light to precisely control and tune brain activity. His group is now extending this technology to probe the dynamics of neural circuits in health and disease. As a practicing psychiatrist, Deisseroth also employs brain stimulation for therapeutic purposes. His group employs a wide range of techniques including optics, stem cell and tissue engineering, electrophysiology, genomics, animal behavior, and computational network modeling. He has received the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, the Presidential Early Career Award for Science and Engineering (PECASE), the McKnight Foundation Technological Innovations in Neuroscience Award, the Coulter Foundation Early Career Translational Research Award in Biomedical Engineering, the American Psychiatric Institute for Research and Education Young Faculty Award, the NARSAD Young Investigator Award, the Whitehall Foundation Award, the Charles E. Culpeper Scholarship in Medical Science Award, the Klingenstein Fellowship Award and the Robert H. Ebert Clinical Scholar Award, the McKnight Foundation Scholar Award, the Top 10 Technologies Award from MIT Technology Review, the William M. Keck Foundation Medical Research Award, the Brilliant 10 Award from Popular Science, the Lawrence C. Katz Prize in Neurobiology from Duke University, the Schuetze Prize in Neurobiology from Columbia University, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Early Career Award, and the Young Investigator Award from the Society for Neuroscience.