Morgan Sheng, M.D., Ph.D.

Morgan Sheng is a core institute member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where he serves as co-director of the Broad’s Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research. He is also a professor of neuroscience in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and an affiliate of both the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory.

From 2001 to 2008, Sheng was the Menicon Professor of Neuroscience at MIT, as well as an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. From 2008 to 2019, Sheng was vice-president of neuroscience at Genentech, a leading biotech company, where he led research and drug discovery efforts for major diseases of the nervous system. His research at Genentech focused on human genetics and pathogenic mechanisms of neurodegenerative disease, particularly Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.

Sheng is a fellow of the Royal Society (UK), a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (UK), a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, and honorary fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He has served on the editorial boards of Neuron, Journal of Neuroscience, and Current Opinions in Neurobiology. A past recipient of the Fondation Ipsen Prize in Neuronal Plasticity and the Young Investigator Award of the Society for Neuroscience, Sheng is author of more than 200 peer-reviewed publications focused on the molecular mechanisms underlying the structure and plasticity of synapses and the molecular-cell biology of neurodegeneration.

Sheng received a B.A. (1^st class honors) from Oxford University and obtained his medical degree and training at London University. His Ph.D. thesis was completed at Harvard Medical School in the lab of Michael Greenberg. Following postdoctoral research in the lab of Lily Jan at the University of California, San Francisco, Sheng served as a faculty member in the Department of Neurobiology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School (1994-2001) before joining MIT (2001-2008).