Hee-Sup Shin

Hee-sup Shin (born 1950) is a South Korean neuroscientist whose work focuses on brain research of genetically engineered mice via gene knockout in order to better understand the human brain. His research resulted in him being named a National Scientist by the Korean Ministry of Science and Technology. He is a former co-director of the Center for Cognition and Sociality leading the Social Neuroscience Group in the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) located at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST).

Education Shin received his M.D. in immunology from the College of Medicine of Seoul National University in 1974. In 1983, he obtained a Ph.D. in genetics and cell biology from Cornell University. During his Ph.D. studies, he worked for several years as a postdoc in immunology at the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research.

Career Upon graduating from Cornell, Shin worked as a research associate in genetics at the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research until 1985. He then moved to Massachusetts where he held a dual position as an associate professor in the Department of Biology at MIT and as an associate member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. In 1991, he returned to Korea to work as an associate professor and later professor in the Department of Life Science in POSTECH where he stayed for a decade. During this time, he also was director of the Biotechnology Research Center in POSTECH and director of the National CRI Center for Calcium and Learning. He was the first researcher within Korea to apply genetics to brain science research and received overseas attention in 1997 upon his discovery of the genes PLC-β1 and PLC-β4, which are related to epilepsy and paralysis.

Leaving POSTECH in 2001, he went to the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) to be a principal research scientist, a position he held for a decade. In 2005, he became the director of KIST's Center for Neural Science and then director-general of their Brain Science Institute. In 2012, he moved to Daejeon to become founding director of the IBS Center for Cognition and Sociality located at KAIST. The center expanded when Changjoon Justin Lee became a co-director of the center in 2018. Lee leads the Cognitive Glioscience Group while Shin led the Social Neuroscience Group until his retirement in 2020. After his retirement as co-director, he continued research at the center as Research Fellow Emeritus. Shin has been particularly interested in defining the functions of voltage gated calcium channels in normal as well as pathological states of the brain.

In particular, his work on the mutant mouse for a1G T-type calcium channels has provided conclusive evidence that T-type channels in the thalamus of the brain function to block sensory information derived from the body to be delivered to the cerebral cortex. The thalamus is the gateway through which all the somatic sensory information from the periphery must pass through to reach the cerebral cortex, where perception is achieved. Thus, the T-type channel mutant mouse lacking this block showed an enhanced response to visceral pain.

Shin has also shown that the same mutant mouse was resistant to absence epilepsy, a disease characterized by a brief loss of consciousness accompanied by abnormal EEG findings. Together, these results indicate that the thalamus is the brain center, controlling the state of consciousness by gating the sensory information from the outside world to reach the cortex, and that T-type calcium channels are the key element in this gating function.

Honors and awards 1983: Frank Lappin Horsfall Jr. Award, Cornell University Graduate School of Medical Science 1994: Korean Academy of Science and Technology, Member 1997: Kumho Science Award, Kumho Foundation 1997: Hantan Life Science Award, Hantan Foundation 1998: Award for Excellent Research Paper in Science & Technology, Ministry of Science and Technology 2000: Hamchun Medical Science Award, Hamchun Foundation 2003: Person of the Month, Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) 2004: Scientist of the Month, Ministry of Science and Technology 2004: Dupont Prize, Dupont Foundation 2004: Grand Prize, Korea Institute of Science and Technology 2004: Ho-Am Prize, Hoam Foundation 2004: Order of Civil Merit, President of South Korea 2004: AHF Lectureship Award, Calgary University, Canada 2005: Top Scientist and Technologist Award of Korea 2005: President, International Behavioural and Neural Genetics Society 2006: National Scientist of the Republic of Korea, Ministry of Education, Science and Technology 2013: Star Professor Award, University of Science & Technology 2015: Hotchkiss Brain Institute Lectureship Award, University of Calgary 2018: Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science 2020: Francine Shapiro Award, EMDR-Europe Society 2021: Fellow, IUPS Academy of Physiologists, International Union of Physiological Sciences