Karl Deisseroth

Karl Alexander Deisseroth (born 18 November 1971) is the D. H. Chen Professor of Bioengineering and of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. He is known for creating and developing the technologies of CLARITY and optogenetics, and for applying integrated optical and genetic strategies to study normal neural circuit function as well as dysfunction in neurological and psychiatric disease.

Deisseroth earned his AB in biochemical sciences from Harvard University and his MD/PhD in neuroscience from Stanford University in 1998, and completed medical internship and psychiatry residency at Stanford Medical School.

Deisseroth has led his laboratory at Stanford University since 2004, serves as an attending physician at Stanford Hospital and Clinics, and has been affiliated with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) since 2009. Since 2014 he is a foreign Adjunct Professor at Sweden's prestigious Karolinska medical institute.

In 2005 Deisseroth's laboratory, including graduate students Edward Boyden and Feng Zhang, published the first demonstration of the use of microbial opsin genes to achieve optogenetic control of neurons, allowing reliable control of action potentials with light at millisecond precision. Deisseroth named this field "optogenetics" in 2006 and followed up with optogenetic technology development work, leading to many applications including to psychiatry and neurology. In 2010, the journal Nature Methods named optogenetics "Method of the Year". In 2013, Deisseroth was senior author of a paper on a new technology named CLARITY, with first author postdoctoral fellow in his lab Kwanghun Chung, which makes biological tissues such as mammalian brains translucent and accessible to molecular probes.

On November 29, 2015, he was awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. He has received the 2015 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Biomedicine, jointly with Edward Boyden and Gero Miesenböck, for the development of optogenetics, the most precise technique for studying the brain today. He was awarded Japan's highest private award, the Kyoto Prize, in 2018 for "his discovery of optogenetics and development of casual systems neurosciences", becoming the youngest receipt of the award till date.In 2019, he was awarded the Rumford Prize for "extraordinary contributions related to the invention and refinement of optogenetics," with Ernst Bamberg, Boyden, Peter Hegemann, Miesenböck, and Georg Nagel. In the same year, he, Boyden, Hegemann, and Miesenböck won the Warren Alpert Foundation Prize.

Despite accepting numerous prestigious awards in the field of optogenetics, he has yet to publicly acknowledge the earlier discovery or contributions made by Zhuo-Hua Pan.

• 2005 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers
• 2011 W. Alden Spencer Award,
• 2013 Jacob Heskel Gabbay Award
• 2013 Brain Prize, Lundbeckfonden
• 2014 Keio prize in medicine
• 2015 Albany Medical Center Prize
• 2015 Lurie Prize in Biomedical Sciences
• 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences
• 2016 Harvey Prize
• 2018 Kyoto Prize (Advanced Technology)
• 2019 Rumford Prize, with Ernst Bamberg, Ed Boyden, Peter Hegemann, Gero Miesenböck, and Georg Nagel
• 2019 Warren Alpert Foundation Prize, with Ed Boyden, Peter Hegemann, and Gero Miesenböck