Feng Zhang Biography

Feng Zhang (born 1982) is the W. M. Keck Career Development Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the departments of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Biological Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also has appointments with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard (where he is a core member) and the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. He is most well known for playing a central role in the development of optogenetics and CRISPR technologies.
Zhang was born in China and moved to Iowa with his mother at age 11 where he attended Theodore Roosevelt High School in Des Moines graduating in 2000. In 1999 he attended the acclaimed Research Science Institute at MIT and in 2000 he won 3rd Place in the Intel Science Talent Search. He earned his A.B. in Chemistry and Physics from Harvard University in 2004 where he worked with Xiaowei Zhuang. He then received his Ph.D. in chemistry and bioengineering from Stanford University in 2009 under the guidance of Karl Deisseroth where he developed the technologies behind optogenetics with Edward Boyden. He served as an independent Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows.
Zhang's lab is focused on using synthetic biology to develop technologies for genome and epigenome engineering to study neurobiology. As a postdoc he began work on using TAL effectors to control gene transcription.

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