Karl Deisseroth was born in the United States in 1971. He received his AB in Biochemical Sciences from Harvard University, and his MD/PhD from Stanford University Medical School in 2000.
Deisseroth has led his laboratory at Stanford University since 2004, serving as an attending physician at Stanford Hospital and Clinics, and has been affiliated with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 2009. Since 2014, he has been a foreign Adjunct Professor at Sweden's Karolinska Institute.
Deisseroth is a practicing psychiatrist and the researcher behind two revolutionary tools for studying the brain: optogenetics, a technique that uses light to control neurons, and CLARITY, a revolutionary method of making brain tissue transparent to observe neural connections and activity.
Deisseroth delivered the Beatty Lecture on October 16, 2014, titled "Illuminating the Brain".
Using optogenetics, the Deisseroth lab has already demonstrated in mouse models that symptoms of anxiety and depression, as well as of drug addiction and Parkinson’s disease, can be improved using non-invasive light-treatment. “By ‘turning down’ [the activity of] a small population of cells we can eliminate the rewarding effects of cocaine,” Deisseroth explained during his Beatty Lecture. Using CLARITY, preliminary studies have revealed an abnormality in the neuro-connectivity of autistic brains. “[Using CLARITY] we saw unusual features that CLARITY helped us be confident of – ladder like connections that are not normally seen,” he explained. “This structural abnormality would be very hard to see without CLARITY.”
Image: Owen Egan
