The National Science Foundation (NSF) named Feng Zhang the 2014 recipient of its Alan T. Waterman Award. This award is NSF's highest honor that annually recognizes an outstanding researcher under the age of 35 and funds his or her research in any field of science or engineering. Zhang's research focuses on understanding how the brain works.
Zhang seeks to understand the molecular machinery of brain cells through the development and application of innovative technologies. He created and is continuing to perfect tools that afford researchers precise control over biological activities occurring inside the cell. With these tools, researchers can deepen their understanding of how the genome works, and how it influences the development and function of the brain. Zhang also examines failures within the systems that cause disease.
Two different lines of fundamental research and technology development are helping him do that: optogenetics and genome engineering. Along with Edward Boyden and Karl Deisseroth at Stanford University, he invented a set of technologies for dissecting the functional organization of brain circuits, The successful development of optogenetics has enabled the systematic investigation of neural circuit function in vivo with unprecedented precision of control. Zhang used that approach to lead landmark studies that illuminated the neural codes for arousal, reward and circuit oscillation. He also developed light-inducible transcription effectors that enabled optogenetic control of transcription and epigenetic process in the brain and other tissues.
Zhang also developed the CRISPR genome editing system--that is, to identify and cut a short DNA sequence underlying a disorder so that it may be deleted or substituted out for other genetic material Although Zhang's main area of focus is the brain, the potential applications of CRISPR technology extend well beyond neuroscience.
He is one of 11 core faculty members at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; an investigator at MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research; and the W. M. Keck Career Development Professor with a joint appointment in MIT's Departments of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Biological Engineering.
Zhang is widely recognized for his pioneering work in optogenetics and genome editing. He shared the Perl/UNC Neuroscience Prize with Karl Deisseroth and Edward Boyden in 2012. In 2013, MIT Technology Review recognized him as a "pioneer" and one of its 35 Innovators Under 35; Popular Science magazine placed Zhang on its Brilliant 10, an annual list of the most promising scientific innovators. Nature also named him as one of the "ten people who mattered" in 2013 for his work on developing the CRISPR system for genome editing in mammalian cells.
