"My name is Juan Song.
I just started my lab a year and a half ago
so we're in new lab.
We have already grow into a group with talented post docs, graduate students.
We're focusing on how neuron activity regulates the neurogenesis.
So I really want to understand the nature and I really want to understand how things
work in biology, a biomedical way.
My dad is a engineer.
So he is the one who really inspired for all this.
That's why I went to graduate school and I went to do a post doc and just take all the
commitments.
Emotionally you have to be so attached to the things you want to do.
I started out my graduate school studying neuroscience.
I was working on fruit flies as a model to study human epilepsy.
I was really, really intrigued by how you stimulate neurocircuits can trigger seizures.
So we're hoping to give out anti convulsive drugs to treat seizures.
I want to study how neurocircuits regulate regeneration in the adults.
Trying to understand how adult neurons were born and how healthy brain regenerate.
And we hope to create some therapeutic interventions for degenerative diseases or brain injuries.
So we're studying neuro stem cells in the adult stage.
So when you develop for Alzheimer's disease and we're hoping to promote neurogenesis.
So antidepressant drugs actually acting through neurogenesis.
So we're hoping to promote the cell population also, trying to improve the drug effects from
anti depressants.The big, big breakthrough we're having is we're taking a cutting edge
technologies to really ask fundamental important questions in the field.
I think UNC is very collaborative.
It's obviously collaborative environment so I started out here about year and a half ago
with all the researchers they're young, they're motivated, they have passion for it and they
spend so many hours and trying so many technologies and I think we are gradually actually getting
there.
We have several techniques that consider very novel in the country and we're hoping we can
move forward with all the new techniques and I think younger people are in a really good
position for that because they're not afraid of trying and failing.
That's all about science.
They are encouraging each other to be the best in the world.
I am a PI.
I'm trying to be as supportive as possible to support their dreams.
If you like something, if you want to pursue something, just go for it.
Sometimes it's not always a smooth pathway and you would hit obstacles but then if you
overcome you would definitely really see bright light just ahead of you."