Applied Physics/Physics Colloquium: Adam Cohen- Bringing Bioelectricity to Light

Abstract: Bioelectrical signaling is ubiquitous in life, from bacteria to brains.  I will describe tools for chronic and volumetric mapping of membrane voltage, and applications in studying biological pattern formation, embryonic development, neural activity, and the onset of the first heartbeats.

Adam Cohen is a professor in the departments of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and Physics at Harvard.  His research focuses on developing tools to study molecules, cells, and organisms, with a focus on imaging membrane potential and other physical forces.  He has used voltage imaging to study bioelectric phenomena in samples ranging from single bacteria to behaving mice to human stem cell-derived neurons from patients with neurological disorders. Cohen has received a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship, Blavatnik National Award in Chemistry, the American Chemical Society Pure Chemistry Award, and a Presidential Early Career Award from Barack Obama.  As a high school student, he won first place in the U.S. Westinghouse Science Talent Search for constructing an electrochemical scanning tunneling microscope. Cohen obtained PhD degrees from Stanford in experimental biophysics (2007) and Cambridge, UK in theoretical physics (2003).  He was an undergraduate at Harvard where he graduated summa cum laude in 2001.