Guoping Feng, newest faculty member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

August 18, 2009 - The McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT announced today the appointment of a new faculty member, Guoping Feng, who is currently an associate professor at Duke University.

Feng, a world leader in the study of synapses, will become a McGovern Investigator and a tenured professor in the MIT department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. He will hold the Poitras Professorship of neuroscience, established by James W. Poitras '63 and Patricia Poitras to support psychiatric research at MIT.

Feng's research focuses on the formation and function of synaptic connections and their disruption in mouse models of human brain disorders. He has developed a variety of genetic technologies to study the mechanisms underlying psychiatric diseases, including obsessive-compulsive disorder and bipolar disorder.

A native of Zhejiang Province, China, Feng obtained his Ph.D. from SUNY Buffalo. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis with Dr. Joshua Sanes, he joined the faculty at Duke University in 2000. He plans to move his lab to MIT in spring 2010.