Episode 43: Ed Boyden | New Tools for Neuroscience | Click to Listen


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After On Podcast #43: New Tools for Neuroscience

Ed Boyden is one of biology’s most influential young researchers. Indeed, he’s one of the field’s most influential researchers of any age. Though he’s not yet 40, the lab he founded at MIT is already the second-largest at the entire Institute. And Ed himself has already invented or co-invented a panoply of research tools, which have spread to thousands of other labs. Collectively, they are helping to change the face of life science research.

Ed Boyden

Ed Boyden

Ed’s creations include optogenetics – a method for exploring and triggering neural circuits on a far more granular level than had ever been possible before. More recently, his lab developed a technology called expansion microscopy. Rather than magnifying the image of a microscopic object, this delightfully . . . inverted technique expands the object itself, to make it more visible. Ed tells us about these and many other revolutionary tools, as well as his philosophy about scientific research, in this fascinating interview.

Rob Reid