The Lin Brain Lab is headed by Dr. Ai-Ling Lin, who is currently an Assistant Professor in the Sanders-Brown Center on Aging, Department of Pharmacology and Nutritional Sciences, and Department of Biomedical Engineering of the University of Kentucky. Originally from Taiwan, Dr. Lin completed her PhD and Postdoctoral training as a medical physicist from the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, TX. She has developed and applied multi-metric neuroimaging methods (MRI, MRS and PET) to quantify cerebral blood flow, and cerebral metabolic rates of glucose and oxygen in humans. She has recently “reversely” translated the imaging techniques that she used in humans to animals, which allow her to identify effects of caloric restriction and rapamycin on cognitive aging and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) with various animal models.
Dr. Lin recently extended her research to include gut microbiome analysis for identifying brain-gut interactions in the context of brain aging and AD. It is her goal to use neuroimaging as surrogate biomarkers to identify effective interventions to preserve brain functions in aging via brain-gut axis.. Dr. Lin has recently been awarded $2.88 million from the National Institute on Aging to study a drug’s potential to prevent Alzheimer’s disease. The news can be found here. Dr. Lin has numerous peer-reviewed articles, book chapters and poster awards to her credit, and directs or co-directs grants from such prestigious institutions as the U.S. Department of Defense, the National Institutes of Health/National Institute on Aging, and the American Federation for Aging Research.