Dr. Ahmed Abdelfattah is an Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at Brown University, where he develops light-responsive, genetically encoded tools for reading and modulating brain activity at high spatiotemporal resolution. He applies these tools to generate a mechanistic description of how the brain carries out its functions through mapping functional connections and monitoring the activity of individual cells and neural circuits. He received his Ph.D. degree in Chemistry from the University of Alberta. He then completed his postdoctoral research at the HHMI Janelia Research Campus where he engineered new chemigenetic probes for imaging brain activity. Abdelfattah received multiple awards including the NIH New Innovator Award, the Searle Scholar Award, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface, and currently holds the Robert J. and Nancy D. Carney Endowed Professorship in Brain Science.