Upon graduating from Cornell, Shin worked as a research associate in genetics at the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research until 1985. He then moved to Massachusetts where he held a dual position as an associate professor in the Department of Biology at MIT and as an associate member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. In 1991, he returned to Korea to work as an associate professor and later professor in the Department of Life Science in POSTECH where he stayed for a decade. During this time, he also was director of the Biotechnology Research Center in POSTECH and director of the National CRI Center for Calcium and Learning. Leaving POSTECH in 2001, he went to the Korea Institute of Science and Technology to be a principal research scientist, a position he held for a decade. In 2005, he became the director of KIST's Center for Neural Science and then director-general of their Brain Science Institute. In 2012, he moved to Daejeon to become founding director of the IBS Center for Cognition and Sociality located at KAIST. The center expanded when Changjoon Justin Lee became a co-director of the center in 2018. Shin leads the Social Neuroscience Group while Lee leads the Cognitive Glioscience Group.
Research
Shin's work is aimed at understanding how changes in calcium dynamics in nerve cells regulate brain functions. He has been defining the physiological roles that a group of genes play in vivo, whose functions are known to be critical for regulation of intracellular calcium dynamics. Shin first generates a transgenic mouse for a given gene, and then analyzes the mouse at the molecular, cellular, physiological, and behavioral levels. Shin has been particularly interested in defining the functions of voltage gated calcium channels in normal as well as pathological states of the brain. In particular, his work on the mutant mouse for a1G T-type calcium channels has provided conclusive evidence that T-type channels in the thalamus of the brain function to block sensory information derived from the body to be delivered to the cerebral cortex. The thalamus is the gateway through which all the somatic sensory information from the periphery must pass through to reach the cerebral cortex, where perception is achieved. Thus, the T-type channel mutant mouse lacking this block showed an enhanced response to visceral pain. Shin has also shown that the same mutant mouse was resistant to absence epilepsy, a disease characterized by a brief loss of consciousness accompanied by abnormal EEG findings. Together, these results indicate that the thalamus is the brain center, controlling the state of consciousness by gating the sensory information from the outside world to reach the cortex, and that T-type calcium channels are the key element in this gating function.
