Distinguished Professors Meet at NeuRA to Continue Atlas Project

Last week NeuRA was very lucky to be visited by the esteemed Professor Charles Watson AM, who is Scientia Prof George Paxinos AO’s longest colleague, friend and also the co-author on the distinguished Brain Atlas series the two have worked on for over 40 years. The Brain Atlas project has been a labour of love that has allowed scientists, researchers, surgeons and enthusiasts to navigate through the brain with extreme precision and grace for years, one atlas, in particular, the Rat Brain Atlas is the most referenced piece of work within the neuroscience field. And although many researchers have participated in many novel atlases over the years, covering brains from the marmoset to the chick, these two have remained true colleagues through the years, albeit only seeing each other in person rarely these days.

The two were enthusiastically working together again last week, continuing the brain atlas project even still. Their current focus is to make two new atlases of the human brainstem, a region of the human brain which surprisingly is still a bit of an unknown. The new atlases will be represented by both traditional histological slides, and cutting-edge new 3D MRI reconstructions, offering all the tools a researcher or surgeon could need. Pictured below the two cartographers deliberate over the fundamentals of the human brainstem, with a striking moment of Prof Paxinos AO captured spotting an error in the current standards, to be corrected by their new upcoming atlas.

9 February 2018

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