Hongkui Zeng serves as Executive Vice President and Director of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, where she leads one of the world's most influential neuroscience research organizations. A distinguished neuroscientist, she received her BS in Biochemistry from Wuhan University in China and earned her PhD in Molecular and Cell Biology from Brandeis University, where she investigated circadian clock mechanisms in fruit flies. Following her doctoral studies, she completed postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, examining molecular and synaptic mechanisms underlying hippocampus-dependent plasticity and learning. She joined the Allen Institute in 2006 and has since played an increasingly pivotal role in shaping the institute's research direction.
Dr. Zeng has pioneered comprehensive approaches to understanding brain organization at the cellular level, developing groundbreaking resources including the Allen Mouse Brain Connectivity Atlas and Mouse Cell Types Program that have transformed neuroscience research worldwide. Her work characterizing extraordinary cellular diversity and underlying rules of brain organization has established essential frameworks for unraveling circuit function mechanisms, providing the foundation for numerous subsequent discoveries. She has spearheaded the development of widely adopted community resources such as transgenic mouse lines, the Common Coordinate Framework, and brain-wide transcriptomic cell type taxonomies that are now standard tools used by researchers globally. Her leadership in the BRAIN Initiative has further accelerated progress toward understanding both normal brain function and neurological disorders.
As an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and an influential figure in the international neuroscience community, Dr. Zeng serves on multiple advisory boards including for Neuron journals and the National Advisory Mental Health Council. Her commitment to open science and collaborative research has established the Allen Institute as a model for large-scale neuroscience projects with data and tools freely accessible worldwide. She continues to guide the development of comprehensive brain maps integrating multiple dimensions of cell properties, connectivity, and function to create a unified understanding of mammalian brain organization. Dr. Zeng's visionary leadership promises to drive transformative advances illuminating fundamental mechanisms of brain function and dysfunction.
