Obituary

John King Chapin, Ph.D. passed away peacefully on January 3, 2022 in Rockville Centre, New York.

John was born on August 10,1951 in Denver, Colorado to Drs. Margaret King and John Ladner Chapin, both Professors of Physiology. His family moved to Wheaton, Maryland in 1965 when John was in eighth grade. In high school, John was both an athlete, excelling in swimming and track, as well as a Shakespearean actor, playing King Claudius in Hamlet and the Duke of Buckingham in Richard III. He graduated from Antioch College in 1973 with a BS in Biology. Taking advantage of Antioch’s internship program, he worked with the noted paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Dr. Stephen Jay Gould at Harvard, an opportunity he often talked about enthusiastically. He then received his Ph.D. in Physiology from the University of Rochester, where he worked with Dr. Donald J Woodward. His thesis, which described the modulation of expected and unexpected sensory input during motor behavior, won the Donald B. Lindsley Award in Behavioral Neuroscience for the best thesis in 1980. He went on to become a member of the faculty of University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas. He eventually joined the faculty of Hahnemann (now Drexel) University in Philadelphia and, later, SUNY Downstate Medical in Brooklyn, where he was a Professor in the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology.

John continued to be a major creative and technological force in the field of neuroscience. He is the author of 108 research works with 7708 citations and 5061 reads. His work with multi-neuron population recordings (Nature Neuroscience 1997) was instrumental in establishing the brain-machine interface (BMI) field which allows brain activity to control robotic devices. This advance has enabled clinical progress in human neuro-robotics in paralyzed patients. His other major contribution was showing that brain control mechanisms (i.e., “robo-rat”) can be used to generate directed behavior. Both of these advances continue to be featured in bioengineering programs with clinical applications. He was the recipient of numerous federal grant awards and several patents. He has been featured many times in the press, on both a national and international level.

John was also a talented artist and could often be found playing his guitar. He was adept at body surfing and skiing, able to master the steepest of mogul-laden slopes with prowess. At home, John was a loving husband and father, an excellent chef and grill-master and always happy to share a story and a smile. He will be missed by all who knew him.

He is survived by his wife of 31 years, Sheryl Smith, and his two daughters, Ashley (28 years) and Arielle (26 years), as well as a sister, Anne Chapin. He is pre-deceased by a brother, Bill Chapin.