Karl Deisseroth is the D. H. Chen Professor of Bioengineering and of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.
Education
He earned his Bachelor of Arts in biochemical sciences from Harvard University and his Doctor of Medicine/Doctor of Philosophy in neuroscience from Stanford University in 1998, and completed medical internship and psychiatry residency at Stanford Medical School.
Career
He is known for creating and developing the technologies of CLARITY and optogenetics, and for applying integrated optical and genetic strategies to study normal neural circuit function as well as dysfunction in neurological and psychiatric disease. He has led his laboratory at Stanford University since 2004, serves as an attending physician at Stanford Hospital and Clinics, and has been affiliated with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) since 2009. Since 2014 he is a foreign Adjunct Professor at Sweden"s prestigious Karolinska medical institute.
Deisseroth named this field "optogenetics" in 2006 and followed up with optogenetic technology development work, leading to many applications including to psychiatry and neurology.
In 2010, the journal Nature Methods named optogenetics "Method of the Year". In 2013, Deisseroth was senior author of a paper on a new technology named CLARITY, with first author postdoctoral fellow in his lab Kwanghun Chung, which makes biological tissues such as mammalian brains translucent and accessible to molecular probes.
On November 29, 2015, he was awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. 2005 National Institutes of Health Pioneer Award.
Membership
National Academy of Sciences]
Deisseroth is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, and the National Academy of Sciences.