Guoping Feng, Ph.D.

Guoping Feng is an institute member of the Broad Institute and a senior scientist and director of model systems and neurobiology in the Broad’s Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research. Feng is also an investigator at the McGovern Institute and the Poitras Professor of Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. Feng studies the development and function of synapses — the junctions at which nerve cells come together to communicate — and the relationship between their disruption and brain disorders. Feng has also developed genetic tools to probe the function of synapses and circuits in the living brain. Using these approaches in combination with behavioral and electrophysiological methods, Feng studies the molecular components of the synapse to understand how disruptions in these components can lead to psychiatric disease.

Before joining the McGovern Institute, MIT, and the Broad Institute, Feng served as a faculty member at Duke University. He has received many awards, including the Gill Young Investigator Award, the McKnight Technological Innovations in Neuroscience Award, and the Hartwell Individual Biomedical Research Award, and is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine.

Originally from Zhejiang Province in China, Feng received his Ph.D. from State University of New York at Buffalo. He completed postdoctoral work at Washington University School of Medicine.