Adam Cohen, Ph.D.

Adam Cohen Ph.D. is a professor in the departments of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and Physics at Harvard University.  His research focuses on developing tools to study molecules, cells, and organisms, with a focus on imaging membrane potential and other physical forces.  He has used voltage imaging to study bioelectric phenomena in samples ranging from single bacteria to behaving mice to human stem cell-derived neurons from patients with neurological disorders.

Cohen has received the Sackler International Prize in Chemistry, a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship, Blavatnik National Award in Chemistry, the American Chemical Society Pure Chemistry Award, and a Presidential Early Career Award from Barack Obama.  As a high school student, he won first place in the U.S. Westinghouse Science Talent Search for constructing an electrochemical scanning tunneling microscope.

Cohen obtained PhD degrees from Stanford in experimental biophysics where he worked with W. E. Moerner (2007) and Cambridge, UK in theoretical physics where he worked with Shaul Mukamel and L. Mahadevan (2003).  He was an undergraduate at Harvard where he graduated summa cum laude in 2001.