Jerzy
Szablowski

Jerzy Szablowski works on technologies to control and monitor the brain with molecular precision. He developed contrast agents for MRI imaging, therapeutics that can be programmed to target different diseases, methods of noninvasive control of specific neural circuits in living organisms, and synthetic serum markers that can monitor brain activity with a simple blood test. In the Laboratory for Noninvasive Neuroengineering, he continues to innovate in developing methodologies for controlling and monitoring cells in the nervous system. Dr. Szablowski received his B.S. from MIT in Biological Engineering, where he published three papers on MRI imaging of neuronal activity and bioelectronics. He then earned his Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) working in the field of molecular recognition and bioorganic chemistry in the laboratory of Peter Dervan, where he focused on the development of new small-molecule therapeutics for oncology that relied on sequence-specific binding to DNA. His postdoctoral work in Chemical Engineering at Caltech in Mikhail Shapiro’s lab led to the development of Acoustically Targeted Chemogenetics (ATAC), the first fully noninvasive neuromodulation method that also allows for control of neuronal cell populations with spatial, cell-type, molecular, and temporal precision. In his lab he developed the synthetic serum marker technology (released markers of activity, or RMA), a noninvasive site-specific brain therapeutic.