Adam E. Cohen, PhD
Harvard University
Biography:
Adam Cohen is the John P. Reardon Jr. Professor in the Departments of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and Physics at Harvard. His research focuses on developing tools to study brain function. He has developed tools to map bioelectrical dynamics within individual neurons and across neural networks, and to record brain-wide patterns of neural activity associated with memory formation. He has also studied the quantum mechanics of light-matter interactions, including weak magnetic field effects in biology. Cohen has received the Sackler International Prize in Chemistry, a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship, Blavatnik National Award in Chemistry, the American Chemical Society Pure Chemistry Award, and a Presidential Early Career Award from President Obama. As a high school student, he won first place in the U.S. Westinghouse Science Talent Search for constructing an electrochemical scanning tunneling microscope. Cohen obtained PhD degrees from Stanford in experimental biophysics where he worked with W. E. Moerner (2007) and Cambridge, UK in theoretical physics where he worked with Shaul Mukamel and L. Mahadevan (2003). He was an undergraduate at Harvard where he graduated summa cum laude in 2001.
Abstract:
I will describe technologies we are developing to watch brain activity across scales, from individual spikes traveling through single cells, to wide-area collective dynamics across the entire cortex of behaving mice.
Adam Cohen is the John P. Reardon Jr. Professor in the Departments of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and Physics at Harvard. His research focuses on developing tools to study brain function. He has developed tools to map bioelectrical dynamics within individual neurons and across neural networks, and to record brain-wide patterns of neural activity associated with memory formation. He has also studied the quantum mechanics of light-matter interactions, including weak magnetic field effects in biology. Cohen has received the Sackler International Prize in Chemistry, a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship, Blavatnik National Award in Chemistry, the American Chemical Society Pure Chemistry Award, and a Presidential Early Career Award from President Obama. As a high school student, he won first place in the U.S. Westinghouse Science Talent Search for constructing an electrochemical scanning tunneling microscope. Cohen obtained PhD degrees from Stanford in experimental biophysics where he worked with W. E. Moerner (2007) and Cambridge, UK in theoretical physics where he worked with Shaul Mukamel and L. Mahadevan (2003). He was an undergraduate at Harvard where he graduated summa cum laude in 2001.
Abstract:
I will describe technologies we are developing to watch brain activity across scales, from individual spikes traveling through single cells, to wide-area collective dynamics across the entire cortex of behaving mice.
