Feng Zhang (; born October 22, 1981) is a Chinese-American biochemist. Zhang currently holds the James and Patricia Poitras Professorship in Neuroscience at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and in the departments of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Biological Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also has appointments with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard (where he is a core member). He is most well known for his central role in the development of optogenetics and CRISPR technologies. Early life and education Zhang was born in China in 1981 and given the name 锋 (which means "point of a spear; edge of a tool; vanguard"). Both of his parents were computer programmers in China. At age 11, he moved to Iowa with his mother (his father was not able to join them for several years). He attended Theodore Roosevelt High School and Central Academy in Des Moines, graduating in 2000. In 1999 he attended the acclaimed Research Science Institute at MIT, and in 2000 he won 3rd Place in the Intel Science Talent Search. He earned his BA in Chemistry and Physics from Harvard University in 2004 where he worked with Xiaowei Zhuang. He then received his PhD in chemical and biological engineering from Stanford University in 2009 under the guidance of Karl Deisseroth where he developed the technologies behind optogenetics with Edward Boyden. He served as an independent Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. Research Zhang's lab is focused on using synthetic biology to develop technologies for genome and epigenome engineering to study neurobiology. He is a leader in the field of optogenetics, which was named the 2010 "Method of the Year". As a postdoc, he began work on using TAL effectors to control gene transcription. Based on previous work by the Sylvain Moineau Lab, Zhang began work to harness and optimize the CRISPR system to work in human cells in early 2011. While Zhang's group was optimizing the Cas9 system in human cells, the collaborating groups of Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna described a chimeric RNA design which is capable of facilitating cleavage of DNA using purified Cas9 protein and a synthetic guide. Zhang's group compared their RNA expression approach with a design based on the Doudna / Charpentier chimeric RNA for use in human cells and established features of the guide necessary for Cas9 to function effectively in mammalian cells which