"My name is Ai-Ling Lin.
I am the principal investigator in the Lin Brain Lab.
I am an assistant professor in the Sanders-Brown Center on Aging in the Department of Pharmacology
and Nutritional Sciences in the University of Kentucky.
I came from Taiwan I grew up in a city, Taichung, in a central part of Taiwan.
My parents are missionaries.
I have one sister and one brother.
We travel a lot with our parents to visit people in their homes, in hospitals, and in
the churches.
This helped develop my passion and compassion for mankind and humanity at a very early age.
I decided to pursue science when I was in junior high.
I was inspired by Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein because I was so fascinated by how
they can use simple equations to describe how things work and the beauty of the universe.
I was hoping one day I could be a physicist or mathematician like them.
I was so lucky to be able to be admitted to the National Yang-Ming University in Taipei,
Taiwan.
Where I had my major in radiology ecosciences and biomedical imaging.
This couldn't be better for me because it combines all these areas including physics,
mathematics, chemistry, biology, physiology, and medicine.
After college I was inspired by my parents to do missionary as well.
So I went to bible training for two years.
There I met my husband and we got married.
Now we have two boys.
Shortly after our wedding we came to the United States because I went to graduate school in
the The University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio to further pursue radiology
ecosciences now this time with an emphasis on neuroimaging.
One of the reasons I came to UK is because UK has the ability and resources to do translational
neuroimaging research.
Here we have very strong clinical trials going on especially Alzheimer's Disease Center of
UK is one of the 27 centers funded by NIH.
This is very attractive because I don't want to just do animal I work.
I want to translate all of these findings into human clinical trials and to make a real
impact in patients and the healthcare.
My long term goal is that I can find a way to do personalized medicine for each individual.
What we are trying to do is build up the database even from at home models or clinical trials
we can identify patterns in each individual.
So in the future we can give them suggestions based on their genetic background.
How to live longer, live healthier.
We monitor these changes with the neuroimaging and even with cognitive testing.
Our goal is that we can identify effective interventions to slow down brain aging and
prevent dementia such as Alzheimer's Disease.
We're using rapamycin, which is an FDA approved drug.
It has been shown to extend longevity and also reduce neuropathology in many cases.
That's one of the treatments that we have.
The other one is very cool.
We use different levels of nutritional intervention.
We want to see how diet can impact our cognition to make us healthier, smarter, and better
memory.
We're using imaging to identify the treatment efficiency of these two interventions.
We do behavior test to see how this impacts the animal's memory and learning ability.
I am glad to have strong support from my family.
My husband gives me strong support and I also can teach science to my kids.
That's really nice.
Professionally, of course, for me I think doing research is more putting all the puzzles
together.
You need to fit the right piece in the right place.
That's really challenging.
Sometimes asking the right questions and finding the right answers for that question is also
very challenging.
This lab, this team is just like a family.
We care for one another.
But at the same time we learn from each other.
Each one of us has their own strength and talent.
So we learn from each other, we challenge each other and in the mean time we also support
one another.
At the end of the day we have a lot of fun."