George Augustine

Professor George J. Augustine is a Professor in Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, Nanyang Technological University. He founded the Center for Functional Connectomics at KIST (Seoul, Korea), where he currently serves as Director. He also is a member of the Programme in Neuroscience and Behavioral Disorders at the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School and is a former member of the Department of Neurobiology at the Duke Medical School in the USA, where he was the G.B. Geller Professor of Neurobiology.

Prof Augustine is well-known for his studies of brain synaptic mechanisms. His lab has shown that neurotransmitter release is triggered by a remarkably local calcium signal; have identified the roles of many proteins involved in neurotransmitter release; and have identified the role of calcium ions and other chemical signals in transducing brief neuronal activity into long-lasting change in brain function. His group also has developed novel optogenetic technologies and is applying these to study brain circuit function.

He has published more than 200 articles and has served on the editorial boards of numerous scientific journals, including Neuron, the Journal of Neuroscience, the Journal of Physiology, Frontiers in Neural Circuits, as well as serving as the founding editor of Brain Cell Biology. He also is well-known as a co-author of the highly popular Neuroscience textbook (Sinauer Associates).