For his research in neuroscience, Dennis W. Choi, M.D., Ph.D., has won the Ho-Am Prize, Korea's most prestigious award.
The Samsung Welfare Foundation presents this prize each year to five outstanding contributors to the fields of medical science, basic science, engineering, the arts, and social service. The award honors the late Byung-Chull Lee, also known as Ho-Am, who was founder and chairman of the Samsung Group.
"The Ho-Am Prize Committee recognizes Dr. Dennis Wonkyu Choi's monumental contributions to the advancement of the study of nervous system injury," said Tae-Wan Kim, assistant manager of the Ho-Am Prize Committee. "His basic research has opened a new window for treating brain diseases."
Choi was born in the United States, but his father comes from Korea. Dennis Choi is the Andrew B. and Gretchen P. Jones Professor of Neurology and head of the Department of Neurology at the School of Medicine and is neurologist in chief at Barnes-Jewish Hospital.
He received the prize in Seoul on March 22. "I was surprised and deeply honored to receive this award," Choi said. "It has great meaning for me, both as encouragement for my professional endeavors and as a personal reminder of my Korean heritage, of which I am most proud."
Choi has received many other honors, including the 1992 Wakeman Award and the 1994 Silvio Conte Decade of the Brain Award from the National Foundation for Brain Research.
He is recognized for research in three areas: the mode of action of benzodiazepine drugs; the mechanisms of nerve cell injury by the neurotransmitter glutamate; and the role of zinc in the selective loss of neurons after cardiac arrest.
Choi was born in Ann Arbor, Mich., and grew up in Watertown, Mass. He completed his undergraduate work at Harvard College in 1974 and received both a doctorate in pharmacology and a medical degree from Harvard University in 1978. After a residency and neurology fellowship at Harvard, he joined the neurology faculty at Stanford University in 1983. He moved to the Washington University School of Medicine in 1991, becoming chair of the Department of Neurology when he was age 38.
Choi is a councilor for the American Neurological Association, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the Society for Neuroscience, the Winter Conference for Brain Research, and the Neurotrauma Society. He also serves on the editorial boards of more than a dozen journals, including Science and the Journal of Neuroscience. He is founding co-editor of Neurobiology of Disease.
He also is an associate of the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego and a member of the Board on Neuroscience and Behavioral Health at the Institute of Medicine. He sits on the scientific advisory boards of the American Paralysis Foundation and the Max-Planck-Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Germany. He is a past member of advisory committees to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the National Institute on Aging at the National Institutes of Health and the Hereditary Disease Foundation.
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