| Hongkui Zeng is Executive Vice President and Director of Allen Institute for Brain Science. Since joining the Allen Institute in 2006, she has led several efforts to develop and operate high-throughput pipelines to generate large-scale, open-access datasets and tools to accelerate neuroscience discovery. Her current research interests are in understanding neuronal diversity and connectivity in the mouse brain-wide circuits and how different cell types work together to process and transform information. Through her leadership of multiple scientific teams at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, she has built several research programs using transcriptomic, connectomic and multimodal approaches to characterize and classify the wide variety of cell types that constitute the mammalian brain, laying the foundation for unraveling the cell type basis of brain function. Her work has led to widely adopted community resources and standards, including transgenic mouse lines, Allen Mouse Brain Connectivity Atlas, the Common Coordinate Framework (CCF) and the brain-wide transcriptomic cell type taxonomy. Zeng received her Ph.D. in molecular and cell biology from Brandeis University, where she studied the molecular mechanisms of the circadian clock in fruit flies. As a postdoctoral fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she studied the molecular and synaptic mechanisms underlying hippocampus-dependent plasticity and learning. She has received many honors, including the 2016 AWIS Award for Scientific Advancement and the 2018 Gill Transformative Investigator Award, and served on multiple committees and advisory boards, including the Society for Neuroscience Program Committee, the Advisory Board of Cell and Neuron, and the National Advisory Mental Health Council. |
