George Paxinos and Charles Watson (now of Curtin University) have been collaborating for over 30 years in one of the most enduring and productive scientific partnerships (resulting in 20 books and 31 articles). They are unquestionably the leading exponents of brain mapping in the world. Since the publication of the first edition of The Rat Brain Atlas in Stereotaxic Coordinates in 1982, they have, together or separately, produced the most widely used atlases of the brains of rat, mouse, rhesus monkey, marmoset monkey, chick, developing rat, and developing mouse, in addition to ground-breaking atlases of the spinal cord of rat, mouse, marmoset, rhesus, and human. Their histological rat brain atlas has been cited over 61,000 times, and is considered to be a fundamental tool of modern neuroscience throughout the world. Recent years have been the most productive in the careers of Paxinos and Watson. Since 2012, Paxinos has published 6 books and 29 articles in refereed journals, and Charles Watson has published 2 books, 13 book chapters, and 29 peer-reviewed journal articles.

Paxinos and Watson were co-authors of an early, highly influential article in the field of high-resolution imaging, in NeuroImage (Schwartz, et al, 2006; A stereotaxic MRI template set for the rat brain with tissue class distribution maps and co-registered anatomical atlas: Application to pharmacological MRI; NeuroImage, 32: 538–550), and since then have published a series of articles on specific aspects of MR mouse brain anatomy with the University of Queensland Mouse Brain Imaging Group (i.e., 4 articles in NeuroImage and one in Brain Structure and Function), and with Al Johnson’s group at Duke University (5 articles). In addition, George Paxinos has held an NIH grant with Susumu Mori of Johns Hopkins University on segmenting images of the developing mouse brain, whereas Charles Watson has a collaboration with Dan Turnbull of NYU on the distribution of injected manganese in MR images of developing postnatal mice.

Listen to an interview with Prof Paxinos and Prof Watson on ABC’s Catalyst, 8 Nov 2007

An MRI/DTI Atlas of the Rat Brain