Dr. Chung earned his B.S. at Seoul National University in South Korea and received his Ph.D. in developmental genetics in 2009 at the University of California, San Francisco. After completing his Ph.D., he worked as a postdoctoral researcher with Dr. Ben Barres at Stanford University. During his postdoctoral works, he found that astrocytes, the most abundant cell type in the central nervous system, actively contribute to the activity-dependent synapse elimination that refines neural circuits during development by phagocytosing synapses via the MEGF10 and MERTK phagocytic pathway. In 2016, Dr. Chung started his own laboratory at KAIST, where he is continuously working on molecular mechanisms and physiological impacts of astrocyte-mediated synapse elimination in the healthy and diseased brains. >