Karl Deisseroth

Karl Deisseroth is the D.H. Chen Professor of Bioengineering and of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He received his undergraduate degree from Harvard, his Ph.D. from Stanford, and his MD from Stanford. He also completed postdoctoral training, medical internship, and adult psychiatry residency at Stanford, and he is board-certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. He continues as a practicing psychiatrist at Stanford with a specialization in affective disorders and autism-spectrum disease, employing medications along with neural stimulation. Over the last sixteen years, his laboratory created and developed optogenetics, hydrogel-tissue chemistry (beginning with CLARITY), and a broad range of enabling methods. He also has employed his technologies to discover the neural cell types and connections that cause adaptive and maladaptive behaviors and has disseminated the technologies to thousands of laboratories around the world.