QnAs with Karel Svoboda.

When Karel Svoboda describes his decades-long efforts to visualize the brain with ever-greater precision, the unmistakable impression is that of a man driven by an insatiable urge to expand the frontiers of technology in the service of science. Since the mid1990s, when he and his colleagues developed transformative imaging techniques to peer at brain cells with unprecedented clarity, Svoboda, a neuroscientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus in Virginia, has expanded the toolbox for unraveling the mysteries of the brain. Svoboda is perhaps best known for using a technique called twophoton microscopy to detect cellular and molecular changes that occur at synapses—the hubs of neuronal communication—during learning and short-term memory. For his pathbreaking techniques and insights, Svoboda, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, earned the Academy’s 2017 Pradel Research Award. Svoboda recently discussed his work with PNAS.