About
My name is Sean Meng. I am a scientist and engineer (in-training). I love people and building community.
Understanding the human mind is, to me, the most beautiful endeavor. With such an understanding, we can: (1) unlock deeper empathy for how we each experience the world (2) mend the broken mind. Two intertwined aspirations for a kinder world.
Doing so requires technologies that can interface with its full distributed architecture, at its relevant timescales, and at scale (most likely in minimally-invasive ways).
Currently
PhD candidate at Caltech (NSF GRFP, Chen Institute fellow), working on the above^
Previously
I received my A.B in Neurobiology from Harvard College in 2026. From 2023-2026, I worked in Bernardo Sabatini's group studying striatal dopamine across the mouse lifespan and its influence on cognitive flexibility. From 2025-2026, I also contributed to the development of a gene-delivery system in George Church's group. I co-led the OpenBio Laboratory, building the Explore incubator (in collaboration with the Nucleate Dojo) and the SRI (Science Research Institute). I was a TIME, Yun, Roberts, and Kempner fellow; and a winner of the Hoopes prize.
Thinking about:
- (fill-in-the-blank: opto, sono, magneto)-genetics in humans.
- How dopamine dynamics shape our reward learning (thereby forming our personalities, proclivities, and the way we interface with our environments).
- Agency loss, (where and how do we properly draw the line between an exogenous technology guiding us vs overriding us).
- PNS axon regeneration, grafting, and Wallerian degeneration (how can we borrow principles from adjacent systems to reawaken an aged/diseased brain’s capacities?).
- Gut microbiota characterization + engineering (how much can we improve our wellbeing just by reconstituting friendly microbes?)
- The DREAM complex, mitochondrial damage, and glymphatic clearance in the aged brain (how do we best push and pull these known levers of dysfunction?)
- Citizen science (and how powerful+productive we can be, all working together). Relatedly, pedagogy for how best to bring out the unique light in others.
- Common denominator molecules that underlie cuisines and our varied palates (and how (my) cooking could be engineered to optimize).
- Circuits underlying novelty and their role in slowing the (retrospective) perception of time.
- Autonomous labs (what should they look like? What is the key “essence” of the scientist after the vision is realized?)
- Faith (religion, conviction, and rationality in a secularizing world; how are two fundamental worldviews reconciled in the modern day)
Contact
seanmeng [at] caltech.edu // (personal) seanmeng17 [at] gmail.com