Shawn Mikula

Abstract

In the summer of 2017, I contacted Shawn, then working at the Max Planck Institute in Martinsried, to ask him to join the Editorial Board of the Journal of Comparative Neurology (JCN). I was very impressed by his scientific acumen and his research on high-throughput electron microscopy that he wanted to apply at the level of an entire brain. Shawn immediately accepted and became a member of our journal s board in January 2018. Even before he was officially a member of the board, with characteristic enthusiasm, he began to assemble a group of contributors for a special issue of JCN dedicated to cutting-edge methods and approaches to structural and functional mapping of the mouse brain. Most unfortunately, his tenure as a member of JCN s board was to be a short one. With great sadness, we learned in July 2018 Shawn s tragic passing. We lost a great friend, a highly dedicated and dynamic colleague, and one of the most talented and promising young investigator in neuroscience at a point when he was developing his career independently at Keio University in Japan. Shawn s career was brief and cut short, but remarkably productive. He received his College Education at the University of Texas in Austin, where he graduated in 1998 with no fewer than three BS degrees in Mathematics, Physics, and Biochemistry. He then completed his PhD in neuroscience in 2005 at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine at the Krieger Mind-Brain Institute in Baltimore, MD, under the mentorship of Ernst Niebur. Afterward, he was a postdoctoral researcher with Ted Jones at the University of California Davis where he developed the BrainMaps project, an internet-enabled multiresolution histochemical and tract-tracing brain atlas for various mammalian species. He moved on to Germany in 2009 for further postdoctoral work with Winfried Denk at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, to pursue his work on comprehensive mapping the mammalian whole-brain circuitry and structure at the synaptic level using high-throughput volume electron microscopy. He became a Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology in Martinsried in 2013 where he developed methods to prepare small mammalian brains for electron microscopy and to image them using high-throughput multibeam scanning electron microscopy. In 2018, he moved to Japan, first at the National Institute for Physiological Sciences in Okazaki, and a few months later to Keio University School of Medicine in Tokyo, where he had just been appointed Assistant Professor at the time he passed away, working on a comprehensive ultrastructural mapping of the circuitry of the whole mouse brain at a single-synapse level of resolution. His goals were eventually to apply these approaches to small nonhuman primate brains. A list of Shawn s major scientific contributions appears at the end of this editorial. This special issue reflects Shawn s last efforts as an editor for our journal. It represents our recognition of his outstanding work and a memory of his contributions to understanding the mammalian wholebrain connectome and developing new techniques “to reconstruct the whole brain s wiring diagram.” The articles assembled in the present issue summarize recent efforts to attain a functional and structural connectome map of the mouse brain through multimodal and multiscale approaches. I am personally indebted to the many contributors who participated in the completion of this issue after Shawn s death and graciously helped me finalize it in a timely manner to celebrate the memory of our friend and colleague. We also express our most sincere and heartfelt condolences to his friends and family.