George Paxinos


George Paxinos AO FASSA FAA is a Greek Australian neuroscientist, born in Ithaca, Greece. He completed his BA in psychology at the University of California at Berkeley and his PhD at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. After a postdoctoral year at Yale University, he moved to the School of Psychology of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. He is currently an NHMRC Senior Principal Research Fellow at Neuroscience Research Australia and Scientia Professor of Psychology and Medical Sciences at the University of New South Wales.
He is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and the Royal Society of New South Wales, and a corresponding member of the Academy of Athens.

Personal life

He has two children.

Research

Paxinos has published 46 research books, 145 refereed journal articles, 30 book chapters, and 17 CDROMs. He has identified 90 nuclei in the rat and human brains. Comparing rats and humans, he has identified 61 homologous nuclei. He has identified 180 nuclei and homologies in birds. He was the first to produce a reliable stereotaxic space for the brain of rats, mice, and primates — a factor fueling the explosion in neuroscience research since the 1980s. He developed the first comprehensive nomenclature and ontology for the brain, covering humans, birds, and developing mammals.

Impact

Most scientists working on the relation between the human brain and neurologic or psychiatric diseases use Paxinos's maps and concepts of brain organisation. His human brain atlases are the most accurate available for identification of deep structures and are used in surgical theatres.

Citation record and grant support

In the field of neuroscience, he is the author of the most cited publication internationally. This is the third most cited book in science after Molecular Cloning and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
He holds two National Health and Medical Research Council project grants. He is a chief investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Integrative Brain Function and of the NIH grant "Towards quantitative cell type-based mapping of the whole mouse brain".
Until 2013, he held an NHMRC Australia Fellowship with UNSW support as well as two grants from NIH. He was a member of the first International Consortium for Brain Mapping. Unlike most academic books, some of his atlases have been commercially successful; he was able to obtain grants for his laboratory from the publishers development to fund eight prizes from book royalties.

Editorial boards of international refereed journals

Paxinos has served on 14 journal editorial boards, including Frontiers in Neuroanatomy, Journal of Chemical Neuroanatomy, Brain Structure and Function, Translational Neuroscience, ISRN Neurology, PLoS ONE, for the SBMT NeuroMapping and Therapeutics Collection, BrainNavigator, Neuroscience and Bio-behavioral Reviews, Journal of Comparative Neurology Human Brain Mapping, Posters in Neuroscience, Journal fur Hirnforschung, and NeuroImage.

Contribution to teaching

He wrote the internationally used textbook The Brain: an Introduction to Functional Neuroanatomy. He taught psychology for 27 years and served on the Academic Board and Council of UNSW. He is currently supervising four postdoctoral fellows.

Professional service

The Nina Kondelos Prize has been awarded annually since 2007 to a female neuroscientist for making significant contributions to neuroscience research. The award is named after the late sister of Professor George Paxinos and was initially funded by him.