Jeff Lichtman

Jeff Lichtman, the Jeremy R. Knowles Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology, is a pioneering experimental neuroscientist who uses electron microscopy and computational reconstruction to study neural connections in the mammalian brain. One of his major research goals is to generate a complete map of the brain’s complex connective pathways.

A member of the faculty since 2004, Lichtman was a founding affiliate of the Center for Brain Science, a University-wide coalition of researchers seeking new insights into neural circuits and how they translate to thought and behavior. Among Lichtman’s research interests is studying how mammalian brains are rewired during postnatal learning — the phenomenon that explains why the young often can learn complex tasks more quickly than adults. Answering such questions led Lichtman and colleagues to develop visualization technologies for neural connections and for monitoring how they are altered over time. One of their inventions, the “Brainbow” method, uses fluorescent proteins in transgenic mouse brains to distinguish individual neurons from each other.

Recently, Lichtman partnered with computational neuroscience colleagues at Google, MIT, Princeton, and elsewhere to focus on the watershed challenge of creating a synapse-level wiring diagram of an entire mammalian brain. In this and other work, he brings together researchers from the life and physical sciences as well as computer science and engineering.

Beyond his own research program, Lichtman serves as faculty director of the Harvard Center for Biological Imaging and is on the steering committees of the Center for Brain Science, the Mind Brain Behavior Interfaculty Initiative, and the Harvard Brain Science Initiative. He is also director of undergraduate studies in neuroscience and chair of the curriculum committee of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology.