It is a great pleasure to announce that Dr. Byoung-Il Bae will join the Department of Neuroscience as an assistant professor on January 4, 2019.
Dr. Bae received his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Johns Hopkins University in 2006 under the guidance of Dr. Solomon H. Snyder. His Ph.D. thesis explored how mutant Huntingtin (mHtt) protein translocates into a cell’s nucleus to cause Huntington Disease (HD), and included the key discovery that mHtt binds to P53 protein to mediate enhanced neuronal loss in HD. This discovery and many other of his significant findings were published in Neuron, PNAS, and Nature Cell Biology, and highlighted in Nature, Science, and Lancet Neurology. Dr. Bae received postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Dr. Christopher A. Walsh at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, where he investigated regional patterning and gyrification in the cerebral cortex by noncoding DNA and alternative splicing. His work was published in several high impact journals, such as Science, Developmental Cell, and Cell. After his postdoctoral work in 2015, Dr. Bae joined Yale University as a junior faculty member, and continued to investigate cortical development, demonstrating his outstanding productivity by publishing a 2018 article in Nature. Dr. Bae is now recognized as one the best and knowledgeable scientists using ferret models to address questions underlying various neurological diseases such as autism.
Dr. Bae is not only a highly productive scientist but also a collaborative and easy-going individual. He enjoys teaching and mentoring students. We are so pleased to welcome Dr. Byoung-Il Bae to the Department of Neuroscience and look forward to more of his exciting research and medical education at UConn Health.