Ted Zwang was born in Danbury, Connecticut, where he and his family lived for three years before they relocated to Houston, Texas. When Dr. Zwang was in middle school, the family moved once more — this time to a small rural town in western New Jersey. Dr. Zwang’s father worked in IT infrastructure and his mother was an artist. 

While some people think of video games and sports as opposite ends of a spectrum, Dr. Zwang enjoyed both when he was growing up. He loved playing video games like Starcraft, Rollercoaster Tycoon, and Pokemon with his friends — and sometimes his mom. On the athletic side, Dr. Zwang played soccer for a travel team. He also loved fencing and excelled at the sport, competing at tournaments internationally and across the country. He considered pursuing fencing in college, but ultimately decided his time would be better spent discovering and exploring what his other passions may be. He found the perfect place to do that: Pomona College in California.

Growing up, Dr. Zwang always enjoyed math and science, and excelled in those subjects. But when he started his undergraduate studies, he had no intention of becoming a research scientist. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to be. Maybe he wanted to be a high school teacher? Or a park ranger? One thing he did know was that he enjoyed spending summer on campus in California, which his organic chemistry TA overheard and led to him being introduced to Professor Malkiat Johal. Professor Johal gave Dr. Zwang his first real research opportunity, which involved using surface chemistry to study solid supported lipid bilayer systems. During that summer, Dr. Zwang fell in love with the idea of pursuing a career in science. He learned how much fun it was to perform research and the faculty at Pomona College gave him freedom to explore many exciting directions. Over the next couple of years, he found excuses to work with a variety of faculty on different research projects. These projects included Professors Matthew Sazinsky and Cynthia Selassie, among others, all of whom helped foster a love for collaborative and multidisciplinary science. These experiences bolstered Dr. Zwang’s newfound passion for scientific research.

After completing his Bachelor of Arts Degree at Pomona college, Dr. Zwang went on to get his PhD in Chemistry from Caltech. While there, he found a place in Professor Jacqueline Barton's lab researching how DNA uses electrochemistry to aid in the ability to find damage and repair it. He credits Dr. Barton for making him the rigorous and resourceful scientist that he is today. He has particularly fond memories of the way that Professor Barton ran her lab, and that she would let people pursue their own novel research ideas if they were passionate about the idea and if they could convince her it was a good idea. This was no easy feat, but it helped teach Dr. Zwang how to plan and present complex research ideas. Dr. Zwang managed to convince Dr. Barton to let him research spin effects in charge transport, which led to his published work describing how the three-dimensional shape of DNA can influence the ability for electron spin states to move through DNA and how biology might take advantage of such phenomena. 

After earning his PhD, he accepted a position as a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard in the lab of Professor Charles Lieber that was developing electronics that could be implanted in the brain and record brain activity from neurons over long periods of time. Dr. Zwang enjoyed his time developing this vital technology but found inspiration in trying to use the technology to understand how brain activity changes as people age. That’s when he reached out to Professor Chris Harvey at Harvard Medical School, who taught Dr. Zwang how to build and utilize virtual reality (VR) systems for neuroscience, and Professor Bradley Hyman at Massachusetts General Hospital, who taught Dr. Zwang about Alzheimer’s disease — both key components of his research today.

Now Dr. Ted Zwang is an Assistant Professor of Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He is deploying flexible neuron-like electronics in combination with VR experiments to understand how cognitive dysfunction arises from aging and Alzheimer’s disease.