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
trials 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 these 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.