At the end of his junior year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1998, Ed Boyden was hanging out with friends in the basement of the famed Media Lab, trying to figure out what to do for the summer. "We saw this competition online and thought, hey, that's cool," recalls Boyden of the first International Underwater Vehicle Competition. "None of us knew anything about submarines at all." Eight weeks later, the initial crew had expanded to a team of about 30 and took home first prize with the autonomously navigating submarine they built.
More than 10 years later, Boyden is back at MIT's Media Lab, combining cellular and systems neuroscience with engineering, studying neural circuits and designing new technologies to control them in order to treat neurological disorders. It's a far cry from submarines, but the approach, he says, is the same: understand the theory and build something useful ...
