Biographies

Dr. Joe Z. Tsien
Professor of Neurology and Co-Director, Brain Discovery Institute, Medical College of Georgia

Dr. Joe Z. Tsien is an Eminent Scholar of the Georgia Research Alliance and Professor of Neurology and Co-Director of the Brain Discovery Institute at the Medical College of Georgia. He has been a leader in elucidating the molecular and neural network mechanisms underlying learning and memory. He is a pioneer in the development of a series of region- and temporal-specific gene or protein knockout techniques. His many contributions over the past ten years have laid the groundwork for a much more sophisticated understanding of the mechanisms by which memories are acquired, consolidated, and stored in the brain. He is also the first to discover the relationship between Alzheimer’s disease genes, adult neurogenesis, and memory function.

Dr. Tsien grew up in China and received his undergraduate education at Shanghai’s East China Normal University from which he graduated in 1984. He came to the United States in 1986 and did his graduate work at the University of Minnesota from which he received a Ph.D. in molecular biology and biochemistry in 1990. Over the ensuing three and half years he worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the Eric Kandel laboratory at Columbia University and was the first one to apply the differential screening technique to isolate a set of brain activity-dependent immediate early genes (Arc and tPA are perhaps the most notable). He then worked with Susumu Tonegawa at MIT where he independently pioneered the Cre/loxP-mediated conditional gene knockout technique which is now widely used in many laboratories around the world. In 1997, he was appointed Assistant Professor of Molecular Biology at Princeton University and was voted to tenured associate professor by the Department before he moved to Boston University to become full professor and Director of the Center for Systems Neurobiology in Spring, 2004. In June, 2007, he joined the faculty of the Medical College of Georgia as an Eminent Scholar and serves as the founding co-director of the Brain Discovery Institute.

He has been the recipient of many awards for his research contributions including: Keck Distinguished Young Scholar Award, ECNU Medal of Science, Burroughs Wellcome Young Investigator Award, Beckman Young Investigator Award. His public service includes membership on several NIH study sections. He has also provided scientific advice to the Science Foundation of Ireland, the Wellcome Trust Fund, Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Beckman Foundation. He is on the council for the Molecular and Cellular Cognition Society (MCCS) and a member of the external scientific advisory board for the Alzheimer Disease Research Center of Johns Hopkins University.

Dr. Tsien has lectured at universities and scientific meetings through out the United States, Europe, and Asia. He has contributed chapters on Learning and Memory for textbooks such as Basic Neurochemistry. He is also known as the creator of the smart mouse Doogie. His rodent creature has been the cover story of Time Magazine and the New York Times, and was selected as one of the top ten major scientific breakthroughs by Science magazine for the year 1999. His scientific leadership in memory research has been also recognized by invitations from Scientific American magazine to contribute two featured articles, one on Building a Brain Mouse in 2000, and another on The Memory Code in 2007.

His laboratory continues to conduct cutting edge research on the molecular and neural mechanism of memory functions and dysfunctions. A good example is that by applying large-scale in vivo ensemble recording technique, his lab has recently discovered a set of very interesting cells in the mouse hippocampus that appears to encode the abstract of concept of nest or bed. This opens a door for understanding how abstract concept and knowledge are generated in the brain at both molecular and neural levels. It is conceivable that this new recording method will be extremely valuable to investigate how the neural network activity patterns may be disrupted in Alzheimer’s disease, especially during its early stage.