Bong-Kiun Kaang, Ph.D. is Professor of Neurobiology at Department of Biological Sciences, College of Natural Sciences, Seoul National University. He joined Seoul National University as a faculty member since 1994. He obtained B.S. at Seoul National University in 1984. He obtained Ph.D. at Columbia University, in 1992 (Sponsor: Nobel Laureate Eric R. Kandel, M.D.). He was Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Center for Neurobiology and Behavior, Columbia University during 1992 -1994.
He is interested in how memory is stored and retrieved. In this regard, his research focuses on molecular events underlying synaptic plasticity. Most synapses are known to be plastic and readily modified by various environmental and learning stimuli. A change in synaptic efficacy leads to a functional modification of neural circuit to represent new information as a result of learning. He has used cellular and molecular biological as well as electrophysiological techniques to study three aspects of synaptic plasticity underlying the sensitization in Aplysia: receptor and ion channel modulation, regulation of memory-specific genes, and structural synaptic remodeling. Recently he has extended these approaches to the mammalian nervous system for the comparative studies of learning and memory across the invertebrate to vertebrates.