Cure Alzheimer's Fund Cure Alzheimer's Fund

Won-Suk Chung, Ph.D.

Dr. Chung is an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at KAIST in South Korea. He earned his B.S degree at Seoul National University in South Korea and received his Ph.D. in developmental genetics in 2009 at the University of California, San Francisco. After completing his Ph.D., he worked as a postdoctoral researcher with Dr. Ben Barres at Stanford University. During his postdoctoral work, he found that astrocytes, the most abundant cell type in the central nervous system, actively contribute to the activity-dependent synapse elimination that refines neural circuits during development by phagocytosing synapses via the MEGF10 and MERTK phagocytic pathway. In 2016, Dr. Chung started his own laboratory at KAIST, where he is continuously working on the molecular mechanisms and physiological impacts of astrocyte-mediated synapse elimination in healthy and diseased brains.

Related Research:

Synapse Pruning by Astrocytes: A Potential New Target for Treating Alzheimer’s Disease Won-Suk Chung 2018-08-09

Funded Research

These projects were made possible from Cure Alzheimer's Fund support.

Project Description Researchers Funding
Synapse Pruning by Astrocytes: A Potential New Target for Treating Alzheimer’s Disease 2017 and 2018

$300,000

Selected Publications

These published papers resulted from Cure Alzheimer’s Fund support.

Lee, E., & Chung, W. S. Glial control of synapse number in healthy and diseased brain, Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience, February 13, 2019, Read More

Liddelow, S. A., Guttenplan, K. A., Clarke, L. E., Bennett, F. C., Bohlen, C. J., Schirmer, L., Bennett, M. L., Münch, A. E., Chung, W. S., Peterson, T. C., Wilton, D. K., Frouin, A., Napier, B. A., Panicker, N., Kumar, M., Buckwalter, M. S., Rowitch, D. H., Dawson, V. L., Dawson, T. M., Stevens, B., Barres, B. A. Neurotoxic reactive astrocytes are induced by activated microglia, Nature, January 18, 2017, Read More

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