Adam Cohen

Adam Cohen is a professor in the departments of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and Physics at Harvard. His research focuses on developing physical tools to study molecules, cells, and organisms. His lab discovered that a gene from a Dead Sea microorganism, when transferred to neurons, converts the electrical impulses of these cells into flashes of fluorescence. He has used voltage imaging to study bioelectric phenomena in samples ranging from single bacteria to behaving mice to human stem cell-derived neurons from patients with neurological disorders.

Cohen founded a biotech company, Q-State Biosciences, focused on combining voltage imaging with stem cell technology to develop new therapies for diseases of the nervous system. The company works on epilepsy, pain, and rare childhood diseases.

Cohen has received a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship, Blavatnik National Award in Chemistry, the American Chemical Society Pure Chemistry Award, and a Presidential Early Career Award from Barack Obama. As a high school student he won first place in the U.S. Westinghouse Science Talent Search for constructing an electrochemical scanning tunneling microscope.

Cohen obtained PhD degrees from Stanford in experimental biophysics (2007) and Cambridge, UK in theoretical physics (2003). He was an undergraduate at Harvard where he graduated summa cum laude in 2001.