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 in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, an affiliate member of the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, and a member of the board of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

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 pathogenic mechanisms of neurodegenerative disease, particularly Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. The goals of Sheng’s current research at the Broad are to understand the neurobiological mechanisms of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and to develop new therapeutics to treat patients suffering from these psychiatric illnesses.

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

Sheng received a B.A. (1st 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 was a faculty member and HHMI investigator in the Department of Neurobiology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School before joining MIT.