JUSTL participant: Dr Cora Sau Wan Lai
Dr Cora Sau Wan Lai is an Assistant Professor in the School of Biomedical Sciences at The University of Hong Kong. She obtained her PhD in 2009 from the Department of Anatomy at The University of Hong Kong in the laboratory of Dr Raymond Chuen Chung Chang, where she investigated how Aβ exerts its toxicity on neurons in Alzheimer’s disease. After completing her PhD, she received her post-doctoral training in Professor Wenbiao Gan’s laboratory at the Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine in the Langone New York University Medical Center, New York (USA) where she investigated synaptic plasticity in learning and memory using an innovative intravital imaging technique in an in vivo model.
Current Work
Since returning to The University of Hong Kong, Dr Lai continues the work she started during her post-doctoral training and investigates synaptic plasticity as well as neural circuits and the signal transduction pathways involved in learning memory, making use of imaging in an in vivo model. Her overall aim is to understand the how memory is stored in the neural circuits and the aetiology of a range of psychiatric disorders with pathology in dendritic spines, including schizophrenia, depression and autism spectrum disorder.
JUSTL Programme
…a utopian research environment…it was awesome, a mixture of vacation, summer school plus exposure to another country and another culture.
Dr Lai joined the JUSTL programme in 2007. One the main reasons for applying to join the programme was that she discovered that many different microscope companies visit the MBL each summer to exhibit and promote their latest imaging equipment. As she had gained a lot of experience working with microscopes during her PhD research in Hong Kong, especially with the Zeiss 510 laser scanning confocal microscope, Dr Lai spoke with Mr Louie Kerr, (Director of Imaging Services at the MBL), and volunteered to be technical support for their Zeiss 510 system. It was during this time, when Dr Lai was working on the microscopy help desk, that she first met her post-doc mentor, Professor Wenbiao Gan.
In addition to her confocal microscopy support work, Dr Lai also worked on several projects during her stay at the MBL. She worked mainly with the JUSTL Co-director, Professor Robert Baker (New York University Medical School) on a project involved in exploring the distribution and migration of neurons during the development of the hindbrain in zebrafish larvae. However, she also spent time with the JUSTL Co-Director, Professor Karen Crawford (St. Mary’s College of Maryland) and learned to microinject squid embryos with the fluorescent calcium dye, calcium green-1. Finally, she helped to prepare aequorin mRNA for a collaborative project between Professor Andrew L Miller (JUSTL Director, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) and Professor Rodolfo Llinás (Department of Physiology and Neuroscience, NYU Medical School, New York, NY), which was injected into the squid giant axon.
Dr Lai attended a total of 55 lectures during the 8 weeks at the MBL and was excited to meet so many famous scientists, including Professor Karl Deisseroth (Stanford University, Stanford, CA), who is known for his work in the field of optogenetics. This was a very memorable experience for Dr Lai. In addition, she found that at the MBL there was a very tight community of neuroscientists, especially from NYU. She found the whole environment to be very supportive, very interactive, and very friendly, and that even when people were not working in the same area, they were still very happy to communicate and talk to each other. Dr Lai says that she hadn’t experienced the environment at the MBL, anywhere else, either when she was at NYU doing a post-doc or now that she is back in Hong Kong.
Dr Lai described the MBL as being a “utopian research environment…it was awesome, a mixture of vacation, summer school plus exposure to another country and another culture”.
