My name is Ai-Ling Lin.
I am the principal investigator in the Ling Lin Lab, and I am an assistant professor in
the Sanders-Brown Center on Aging and the Department of Pharmacology in Nutritional
Sciences in the University of Kentucky.
I came from Taiwan.
I grew up in a city in Taichung, a city in the central part of Taiwan, and my parents
are missionaries and 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.
So this helped develop my 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 could use simple equations to describe how things work and the beauty of the universe.
So I was hoping one day I could be like 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 co-sciences and biomedical imaging.
And this couldn’t be better for me because it combines all these areas including physics,
mathematics, biochemistry, biology, physiology, and medicine.
So after college, because of the inspiration of my parents, I decided to be a 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 and shortly after our wedding, we came to the United States because
I went to graduate school in the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio
to further pursue radiological sciences and now this time with an emphasis on neuroimaging.
One of the reasons I came to UK is that because UK has the ability and resources to do translational
neuroimaging research.
And here, we have very strong clinical trials going on, especially Alzheimer’s disease
center of UK is one of the twenty-seven centers funded by NIH, so this is very attractive
because I don’t want just to do just animal work.
I want to translate all these findings into human clinical trial and to make a real impact
in patients and in healthcare.
My long-term goal is that I can find a way to do personalized medicine for each individual.
So what we are trying to do here is build up a database, even from animal models or
clinical trials, we can identify patterns in each individual.
So in the future, we can give them a suggestion based on their genetic background how to live
longer, live healthier, and we can monitor this changes with neuroimaging and even with
cognitive testing.
So 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 a FDA-approved drug that can be shown to extend longevity
and also reduce neuropathology in many cases.
So that’s one of the treatments we have.
The other one is very cool.
We use different levels of nutritional intervention and we want to see how diet can impact our
cognition to make us healthier, smarter, and have better memory.
So we are using imaging to identify the treatment efficacy of these two interventions, and we
do behavior tests to see how this impacts the animals memory and learning ability.
I am glad to have strong support from the family, so in the personal life, my husband
gives me strong support and I also can teach science to my kids.
That’s really nice.
And professionally, of course for me, I think of doing research is more like putting all
the puzzles together.
So you need to find the right piece and put it in the right place.
That’s really challenging and 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 and 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 meantime we also support
one another.
So in the end of the day, we have a lot of fun.