[3] He has served on the editorial boards of Current Opinions in Neurobiology, Neuron, and The Journal of Neuroscience.

[4] Sheng received a PhD in molecular genetics from Harvard University.

His postdoc was performed at the University of California, San Francisco.

[5] Following that, Sheng was an assistant professor and associate professor at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute,[6] professor of neuroscience at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and vice president of neuroscience at Genentech.

[7][8][9] His research has focused on pathogenic mechanisms of neurodegenerative diseases and molecular cellular biology of synapses and synaptic plasticity.