JUSTL participant: Dr Chi Wai Lee
Dr Chi Wai Lee has been an Assistant Professor in the School of Biomedical Sciences at The University of Hong Kong since 2015. He obtained his PhD in 2005 in the laboratory of Professor H. Benjamin Peng in the Division of Life Science and State Key Laboratory of Molecular Neuroscience at the The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. There, he studied the clustering and function of mitochondria during presynaptic development in the neuromuscular junction using Xenopus laevis (African clawed frog) as the model system. After obtaining his PhD and with support from the Croucher Foundation, Dr Lee received his post-doctoral training first at Rutgers University (New Jersey) and then at Emory University (Atlanta, Georgia) in the US. He returned to The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology briefly as a Research Assistant Professor in Professor Peng’s laboratory, before taking up the position of Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore.
Current Work
At The University of Hong Kong, Dr Lee’s current research is focussed on the signal transduction pathways and cytoskeletal changes that occur during the development, disease and regeneration of synapses, using the neuromuscular junction (nerve/muscle synapse) as a model. He is interested in investigating how cytoskeletal proteins such as actin and tubulin can regulate vesicular trafficking of different proteins and organelles. He is especially interested in determining how the acetylcholine receptor, which is the major receptor of the neuromuscular junction can be inserted into membranes and how they are organised to form clusters. He does a lot of live cell imaging to visualise vesicular trafficking and cytoskeletal rearrangements as well as surface tracking of individual receptors on the cell membrane.
JUSTL Programme
Dr Lee attended the JUSTL programme in 2012 when he was a Research Assistant Professor at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Due to his seniority, Dr Lee worked on his own project for much of his time at the MBL but he also spent time in the laboratory of Dr Scott Brady (University of Illinois at Chicago). Dr Brady is an expert in axonal transport and Dr Lee gained experience using the giant axon of the longfin inshore squid (Doryteuthis pealei) to investigate how microtubules and other motor proteins regulate axonal transport cargoes. He used video microscopy to visualise the anterograde and retrograde transport of different organelles and cargoes along microtubules. Dr Lee and Dr Brady still keep in touch during scientific conferences such as the American Society of Cell Biology (ASCB) and the International Society of Neurochemistry (ISN) meetings.
Dr Lee was also particularly enthusiastic about spending time at the MBL because of the world-class National Xenopus Resource (NXR), which had recently opened (in 2011) and which provides a platform for generating and maintaining transgenic lines of Xenopus laevis and Xenopus tropicalis as well as providing stock to the Xenopus research community. Indeed, Dr Lee is very grateful to the NXR Director, Dr Marko Horb, for giving him access to one of the first transgenic lines of Xenopus laevis that was developed, which expresses Venus-YFP (yellow fluorescent protein) in most of the cells of the body. Dr Lee used this transgenic line for a pilot project where he investigated the earliest interaction between nerve and muscle cells during the formation of the neuromuscular junction.
Dr Lee summed up his time on the JUSTL programme as being a “wonderful experience”. He learned a lot from top scientists both from attending their lectures and interacting with them during social activities. In addition, because he was given the opportunity to conduct independent research at the MBL, he believes that the experience away from his home institution really helped to shape and train his independence, which was a key factor in the development of his career.