About: Joe Z. Tsien

Joe Z. Tsien is a neuroscientist who pioneered Cre/lox-neurogenetics in the mid-1990s, a versatile toolbox for neuroscientists to study the complex relationships between genes, neural circuits, and behaviors. He is also known as the creator of the smart mouse Doogie in the late 1990s while being a faculty member at Princeton University. Recently, he developed the Theory of Connectivity in an effort to explain the origin of intelligence, or the basic design principle underlying brain computation and intelligence. The theory states that brain computation is organized by a power-of-two-based permutation logic in constructing cell assemblies - the basic building blocks of neural circuits. The theory has received initial validation from experiments. The discovery of this basic computational log