Jin Hyung Lee (neuroscientist)

Also known as: Professor Jin Hyung Lee, Jin Lee Stanford

In one sentenceJin Hyung Lee is a Stanford associate professor of neurology, neurosurgery and bioengineering, known for optogenetic fMRI (ofMRI) and brain circuit research.

Overview

Jin Hyung Lee studies the brain as a vast circuit, combining engineering and biology to work out how that circuit is wired and how it functions. Lee is an associate professor of neurology and neurological sciences, of neurosurgery and of bioengineering at Stanford University, with a courtesy appointment in electrical engineering, and a member of Stanford Bio-X and the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute.

The official Stanford profile lists Lee’s research interest as “in vivo visualization and control of neural circuits.” The lab’s website carries the line “Understand and Repair Brain Circuits.”

Education and early path

Lee earned a BS in electrical engineering from Seoul National University, then an MS and a PhD (2004) in electrical engineering from Stanford. In a 2023 interview with Yonhap News Agency, Lee said that a grandmother’s long illness after a stroke, during Lee’s years as a graduate student abroad, set the goal of solving brain disease.

The engineering background still shapes the work. The lab describes using methods from medical imaging and signal processing to genetics and molecular biology to “analyze, debug, and manipulate” brain circuits.

Optogenetic fMRI (ofMRI)

Lee is the first author of the 2010 Nature paper “Global and local fMRI signals driven by neurons defined optogenetically by type and wiring,” co-authored with Karl Deisseroth, a pioneer of optogenetics, and colleagues.

The team combined optogenetics, which switches specific neurons on with light, with fMRI, which measures activity across the whole brain. When they used light to drive only excitatory neurons in rodent motor cortex, BOLD signals appeared both at the stimulation site and in distant connected regions. This approach, which causally links the activity of defined cells to brain-wide responses, is optogenetic fMRI (ofMRI).

Circuits and brain disorders

The lab lists its current themes as circuit mechanisms underlying brain disorders, novel circuit-based therapeutic approaches, and machine learning and brain computational modeling. Grants and awards listed on the Stanford profile include work on Alzheimer’s disease, traumatic brain injury, basal ganglia circuit dynamics and epilepsy.

Noninvasive tools: mechanogenetics and functional ultrasound

In 2019 Lee received the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award. According to Stanford Medicine, the award supports two technologies: mechanogenetics, a method for noninvasive, precisely targeted mechanical perturbation of living cells in the mammalian brain, and functional ultrasound imaging that can monitor whole-brain function in awake, active animals. The lab sums up this arc as “From ofMRI to Mechanogenetic Functional Ultrasound.”

Company

According to Yonhap News Agency (2023), Lee founded the company LVIS in Silicon Valley in 2013, building on the lab’s research. LVIS develops NeuroMatch, software that helps neurologists review and analyze EEG recordings. The company’s official page describes the technology as the product of more than a decade of research led by Lee.

LVIS, the company Professor Jin Hyung Lee founded, introduces its NeuroMatch software on its official website; the latest publications are on the Stanford lab website. LVIS official website → · Lab website