SAN DIEGO — Dr. Karl Deisseroth is having a very early breakfast before the day gets going at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. Thirty thousand people who study the brain are here at the Convention Center, a small city’s worth of badge-wearing, networking, lecture-attending scientists.

For Dr. Deisseroth, though, this crowd is a bit like the gang at Cheers — everybody knows his name. He is a Stanford psychiatrist and a neuroscientist, and one of the people most responsible for the development of optogenetics, a technique that allows researchers to turn brain cells on and off with a combination of genetic manipulation and pulses of light.

He is also one of the developers of a new way to turn brains transparent, though he was away when some new twists on the technique were presented by his lab a day or two earlier.

“I had to fly home to take care of the kids,” he explained. He went home to Palo Alto to be with his four children, while his wife, Michelle Monje, a neurologist at Stanford, flew to the conference for a presentation from her lab. Now she was home and, here he was, back at the conference, looking a bit weary, eating eggs, sunny side up, and talking about the development of new technologies in science.