Li-Huei Tsai facts for kids

Li-Huei Tsai (born March 18, 1960) is an American neuroscientist. This means she is a scientist who studies the brain and the nervous system. She is the director of the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This institute focuses on how we learn and remember things.

Dr. Tsai is well-known for her important work on brain diseases that affect learning and memory. She has done a lot of research on Alzheimer's disease. This disease causes problems with memory, thinking, and behavior. Her lab has also found new ways to use special cells called induced pluripotent stem cells to study brain diseases in the lab.

Her Journey in Science

Early Life and Education

Li-Huei Tsai was born and grew up in Taiwan. In 1984, she received a special scholarship to study veterinary medicine at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. While there, she heard lectures from a famous cancer researcher, Howard Temin. This made her very interested in studying how cells work at a tiny level, especially in relation to cancer.

She earned her PhD in 1990 from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. A PhD is a very high degree that shows someone is an expert in their field.

Career Highlights

In 1991, Dr. Tsai started working in a lab at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. She also worked at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center. In 1994, she became a professor at Harvard Medical School.

Later, in 2006, she moved to MIT. In 2009, she became the director of the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. She also helped start MIT's Aging Brain Initiative. This group studies how the brain changes as people get older. In 2019, Dr. Tsai became a co-director of the Alana Down Syndrome Center at MIT.

Discoveries About the Brain

Understanding Brain Development

Early in her career, Dr. Tsai studied proteins called cyclin-dependent kinases, or CDKs. She wanted to know what they do in cell division. She became very interested in a specific CDK called CDK5. She found that CDK5 was only active in the brain, not in other body tissues. She also learned that CDK5 needs another protein, called p35, to work properly.

After moving to Harvard Medical School, she continued to study CDK5 and p35. She found that if mice didn't have p35, their brains didn't develop correctly. They also had seizures. Her research showed that CDK5-p35 activity is very important for brain cells to grow and connect properly.

Research on Alzheimer's Disease

Dr. Tsai also discovered that while CDK5 is important for a healthy brain, having too much of it is linked to Alzheimer's disease. She noticed that a shorter version of p35, called p25, built up in damaged brain tissue from mice and from people who had Alzheimer's.

In one experiment, she used mice that were changed to have more CDK5. These mice developed symptoms similar to Alzheimer's. They had trouble learning and thinking, lost many brain cells, and developed amyloid plaques very quickly. Amyloid plaques are sticky clumps of protein that build up in the brains of people with Alzheimer's.

Finding Ways to Help

After moving to MIT in 2006, Dr. Tsai started looking for ways to make Alzheimer's symptoms better or even reverse them. In a 2007 study, she trained mice to find a hidden platform in a pool. When she gave the mice Alzheimer's-like symptoms, they couldn't find the platform anymore. But after spending time in a special "enriched environment" (like a fun playground for mice), their memories came back! They could find the platform right away.

Dr. Tsai found she could get the same results by giving the mice a medicine. This medicine stopped certain enzymes called histone deacetylases, or HDACs, from working. These enzymes are involved in how genes are turned on and off. In later studies, she showed that one type of HDAC, called HDAC2, can block genes important for brain cell connections. By stopping HDAC2, some memory and thinking abilities could be restored.

Her work has shown how changes in our DNA and how our genes are controlled (called epigenetics) play a role in Alzheimer's disease. She found that the DNA breaks needed for learning can also lead to problems as we age because our bodies get worse at fixing DNA. She also discovered that the genes linked to Alzheimer's mostly affect the brain's immune system, not just the brain cells themselves.

In 2016, Dr. Tsai showed something amazing. When mice with Alzheimer's-like symptoms were exposed to a special LED light flashing at 40 times per second, the beta amyloid plaques in their brains were greatly reduced. This might happen by creating special brain waves called gamma oscillations.

More recently, Dr. Tsai has created a model of the Blood–brain barrier in her lab. This is a protective shield around the brain. She uses this model to study how genes linked to Alzheimer's, like APOE, can cause this barrier to break down.

Awards and Recognition

Dr. Li-Huei Tsai has received many important awards for her groundbreaking research:

• 1997: Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
• 2008: Academician, Academia Sinica
• 2010: Glenn Award for Research in Biological Mechanisms of Aging
• 2011: Member, National Academy of Medicine
• 2011: Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science
• 2016: Mika Salpeter Lifetime Achievement Award, Society for Neuroscience
• 2019: Fellow, National Academy of Inventors
• 2019: Hans Wigzell Research Foundation Science Prize

See also

• Neuroscience of ageing