Rate My Professor John Eccles

Sir John Carew Eccles was an Australian neurophysiologist who served as Foundation Professor of Physiology at the John Curtin School of Medical Research at the Australian National University from 1951 to 1966. Born in Melbourne in 1903, he graduated in medicine from the University of Melbourne in 1925 and, as a Rhodes Scholar, pursued neurophysiology research with Sir Charles Sherrington at the University of Oxford, earning a DPhil. He held the Chair of Physiology at the University of Otago in New Zealand from 1943 to 1951 before joining ANU, where he conducted pioneering studies on synaptic transmission using intracellular microelectrodes. His work at ANU demonstrated the chemical nature of excitatory and inhibitory synaptic transmission in the central nervous system, particularly in the spinal cord, thalamus, hippocampus, and cerebellum.