Jin Hyung Lee, reading the brain like a circuit board
From electrical engineering in Seoul to neuroscience at Stanford: following Professor Jin Hyung Lee, who led the work on optogenetic fMRI.
An engineer hunting for a fault on a circuit board injects a signal at one point and watches where the response comes back. Stanford professor Jin Hyung Lee brought that simple, powerful idea to the brain. The line on the lab’s homepage is just as direct: “Understand and Repair Brain Circuits.”
From circuits to the brain
Lee studied electrical engineering at Seoul National University, then earned an MS and a PhD (2004) in the same field at Stanford. The starting point was signals and circuits, not neurons.
Family changed the direction. In a 2023 interview with Yonhap News Agency, Lee said there was no particular field in mind on entering university. Watching a grandmother endure a long illness after a stroke, during Lee’s years studying abroad, turned “solving brain disease” into the question worth pursuing.
Send a signal, listen to the whole brain
In 2010 Lee was first author of a paper in Nature that joined two techniques: optogenetics, which switches on specific neurons with light, and fMRI, which measures activity across the whole brain.
When the team shone light on only the excitatory neurons of rodent motor cortex, fMRI signals rose at that spot and in distant connected regions. Knowing exactly which cells had been switched on, they could hear the whole brain answer. The method is called optogenetic fMRI, or ofMRI; NeuroArchive explains it in detail in its optogenetic fMRI entry.
The experiment mattered because fMRI is the workhorse of human brain research, yet the cellular source of its signal had long been a matter of inference. By fixing the cause before measuring the effect, ofMRI gave that inference a reference point. An engineer’s habit of injecting a signal and reading the response had met one of neuroscience’s oldest questions.
Awards for bold research
Recognition followed: the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award in 2010, an NSF CAREER Award in 2011, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in 2012, and in 2018 the first Lina 50+ Award Grand Prize.
In 2019 Lee received the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, which Stanford Medicine described as funding “investigators at all career levels with bold and innovative research projects.” Lee planned to use it to develop two technologies: mechanogenetics, 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.
Lee described the aim this way:
“Our goal is to develop powerful new technologies that allow us to decode the brain’s complicated circuitry and discover therapies for neurological diseases like epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease.” — quoted by Stanford Medicine (2019)
Beyond the lab
According to Yonhap News Agency, Lee founded the company LVIS in Silicon Valley in 2013, building on the lab’s research. Its NeuroMatch software helps neurologists review and analyze EEG recordings, carrying a way of reading circuits from the lab into the clinic’s EEG reading room. In the same interview Lee recalled how hard it had been to pursue original research as an Asian woman scientist in the United States, and stressed the importance of networks that support Korean scientists and engineers.
Why we follow this work
What stands out in Lee’s career is the way it crosses boundaries: reading the brain in the language of electrical engineering, tying light and magnetic fields into one experiment, and now pursuing the same questions with ultrasound instead of light. Few research stories show so clearly how the tools of one field can open a new path through the questions of another.
Lee’s timeline, honors and key publication are collected on the profile page. For the latest research, visit the Stanford lab website.
Sources
- Jin Hyung Lee — Stanford Profiles
- Stanford University Lee Lab
- Global and local fMRI signals driven by neurons defined optogenetically by type and wiring. Lee JH et al. Nature 465, 788–792 (2010)
- $4.75 million awarded to scientists for high-risk, high-reward research. Stanford Medicine News Center, 2019-10-01
- Interview with Professor Jin Hyung Lee (in Korean). Yonhap News Agency via Financial News, 2023-07-05
- Company | LVIS Corporation. LVIS official company page
- 510(k) K250239 — LVIS NeuroMatch Software, Indications for Use. U.S. FDA, 2025-05-23
