Dong-Jun won Excellent Poster Award from the annual symposium of Institute for Molecular Biology and Genetics, for his work on tissue processing techniques. Congratulations!!

Myungsun, Seongrae and Kyunghoe entered the graduate school as a chemistry major and will pursue PhD in K-Lab. They are more than well prepared as beginning neuroscientists, since they have been working in the lab as interns and earned so much knowledge, research experience, and data. Their wish, officially, is to publish in Cell, Nature and Science, each one covering each journal. Best wishes to them!

Dr. Ofer Yizhar, a rising star at Weizmann Institute in Israel visitied K-Lab. His research is focused on the PFC circuitry E/I balance and optogenetic tool development. We are excited to launch a collaborative project with his group soon (funded by HFSP).

We participated in Neurosplash Workshop in Kumsan on 2017/8/24-26 and enjoyed the systems neuroscience community in Korea. Participated labs include the labs of Inah Lee, Sung-Yon Kim, Jung-Soo Han, Chihye Chung, Min-Whan Jung, June-Seek Choi and Jeiwon Cho from SNU, KAIST, Korea Univ., Konkuk Univ. and Catholic Univ.

We had a joint workshop with Dr. Greg Suh’s lab in Gapyeong on July 14-15, 2017. Enjoyed fun water activities and BBQs, and heard about ongoing works from each student (until 11 pm!) With shared research interest in homeostatic regulation, the discussion was lively and many creative ideas came up. It was a fun, exciting and very helpful workshop.

Several leading neuroscientists recently visited K-Lab: Sergiu Pasca (on 5/20/2017) and Hyungbae Kwon (6/28/2017). Sergiu Pasca is a young professor at Stanford who is making a series of important findings in the neural development using iPSC. Hyungbae Kwon, a lab head at Max Planck Florida Institute who develops light-dependent molecular tools for neuroscience and studies the motor cortical circuitry using two-photon calcium imaging. We will see each other more often in the future in conferences.

We went to the first annual IMBG retreat on June 19-20. All labs of the Institute participated, every student and postdocs took turns to give 1-min talks, several professors gave insightful and informative lectures, and fun recreational activities and BBQ party followed. At night, K-Lab members held a Starcraft competition and had much fun.

Our lab was selected as the awardee of Young Investigators’ Grants from Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP). The Human Frontier Science Program is an international program of funding for frontier research in the life sciences. Read more about this from the following news articles (Korean):

Dong-a Ilbo news article
Dong-a Science news article

We had a joint workshop with Dr. Hyosang Lee’s lab (DGIST) at Gangchon Elysian Resort on Feb 15-16, 2017. We felt tight to each other since we are the two of only a handful of neural circuit labs in Korea, and also we started around the same time. All the best to the two labs!!

K-labbers had the end-of-year dinner for 2016 at SY’s house (this is the second annual holiday dinner 🙂 Everyone worked hard in the lab this year, and we anticipate that the efforts will bear abundant fruit next year. Cannot wait to see it in 2017!