Karel Svoboda is a group leader at The Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm Research Campus. His lab is studying synaptic plasticity in response to new experiences in the developing and adult neocortex. By developing new biochemical tools and new microscopes, Svoboda’s group has been able to track changes in individual synapses in intact tissue.
Svoboda received a BA in physics from Cornell University and a PhD in Biophysics from Harvard University. Following a post-doc at Bell Labs with Winfried Denk and David Tank, he joined Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory where he was a professor from 1997 to 2006 and HHMI investigator from 2000.