Charles Watson is a neuroscientist and public health physician. His qualifications included a medical degree (MBBS) and two research doctorates (MD and DSc). He is Professor Emeritus at Curtin University, and holds adjunct professorial research positions at the University of New South Wales, the University of Queensland, and the University of Western Australia.
He has published over 100 refereed journal articles and 40 book chapters, and has co-authored over 25 books on brain and spinal cord anatomy. The Paxinos Watson rat brain atlas has been cited over 80,000 times. His current research is focused on the comparative anatomy of the hippocampus and the claustrum.
He was awarded the degree of Doctor of Science by the University of Sydney in 2012 and received the Distinguished Achievement Award of the Australasian Society for Neuroscience in 2018.
Dr Gulgun Sengul, MD is a specialist in the anatomy of the spinal cord and brainstem, with a particular interest in pain pathways. Dr Sengul co-authored 'The Spinal Cord: A Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation Text and Atlas' published by Elsevier in 2009. Dr Sengul was first author of the 'Atlas of the Spinal Cord of the Rat, Mouse, Marmoset, Rhesus, and Human' published by Elsevier in 2013. This latter book includes the first published atlases of the spinal cord of the marmoset and rhesus monkeys and the first diagrammatic and cytoarchitectonic atlas of the human spinal cord. Dr Sengul also contributed to the Allen Spinal Cord Atlas and brainstem part of the BrainSpan Atlas of the Developing Human Brain projects. The rodent and primate atlases produced by Dr Sengul and her colleagues provide an important platform for future spinal cord research.
Professor Paxinos is the author of almost 50 books on the structure of the brain of humans and experimental animals, including The Rat Brain in Stereotaxic Coordinates, now in its 7th Edition, which is ranked by Thomson ISI as one of the 50 most cited items in the Web of Science. Dr. Paxinos paved the way for future neuroscience research by being the first to produce a three-dimensional (stereotaxic) framework for placement of electrodes and injections in the brain of experimental animals, which is now used as an international standard. He was a member of the first International Consortium for Brain Mapping, a UCLA based consortium that received the top ranking and was funded by the NIMH led Human Brain Project. Dr. Paxinos has been honored with more than nine distinguished awards throughout his years of research, including: The Warner Brown Memorial Prize (University of California at Berkeley, 1968), The Walter Burfitt Prize (1992), The Award for Excellence in Publishing in Medical Science (Assoc Amer Publishers, 1999), The Ramaciotti Medal for Excellence in Biomedical Research (2001), The Alexander von Humbolt Foundation Prize (Germany 2004), and more
