JUSTL participant: Dr Franki Kai-Hei
Dr Franki Kai-Hei Tse has just started a new job as an Assistant Professor at The Polytechnic University of Hong Kong. He graduated with a PhD from Prof Helen Wise’s laboratory at The Chinese University of Hong Kong where he was investigating the role of Toll-like receptor 4 in regulating neural information in sensory neurons during their interaction with glial cells. He was interested in finding out if this receptor signalling pathway might play a role in regulating inflammatory pain. He discovered the functional expression of Toll-like receptor 4 in neurons, which was very unexpected because neurons are supposed to be immune-privileged. However, he showed that neurons expressing Toll-like receptor 4 recognise danger signals such as invasion by bacteria (identified via lipopolysaccharides on the outer membrane) and induce inflammation. This was a new and exciting finding because while it has been known for many years that inflammation in the nervous system requires infiltration of microglia and macrophages, this was the first demonstration of neurons regulating inflammation by themselves. After finishing his PhD in 2014, Dr Tse moved to The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology where he was a Post-Doctoral Researcher and subsequently a Research Assistant Professor in the laboratory of Prof Karl Herrup. There he explored the cellular mechanisms involved in the myelin degeneration known to occur in age-related Alzheimer’s disease.
Current Work
Dr Tse has recently started a new job as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Technology and Informatics. He is currently setting up his laboratory there where he will continue his research on oligodendrocytes and myelin degradation in the aging brain and during age-related Alzheimer’s disease, and he is especially looking forward to training the next generation of scientists.
JUSTL Programme
..every [JUSTL] student could conduct their own project as a more-or-less independent investigator, should they so wish.
Dr Tse was a PhD student at The Chinese University of Hong Kong when he joined the JUSTL programme in 2013. He was involved in two different projects at the MBL. For the first few weeks, under the guidance of Profs Andrew L. Miller (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) and Robert Baker (New York University Medical School), the JUSTL Director and co-Director, respectively, Dr Tse established protocols to evaluate the use of zebrafish larvae for screening pharmacological compounds using changes in their locomotory behaviour as a read-out. The second half of Dr Tse’s summer at the MBL was spent in the laboratory of Prof Scott T. Brady (University of Illinois at Chicago, IL, USA). There, he learned how to make use of the giant unmyelinated axon of the squid (Doryteuthis pealei) for studying axonal transport. In his end-of-programme report, Dr Tse said that “the new techniques and new knowledge [gained] from the JUSTL programme are all translational to my PhD programme in Hong Kong.” He went on to say that he wished that he might have an opportunity to return to the MBL again perhaps as a Summer course participant or as a Young Investigator.
When I spoke with Dr Tse recently, he told me that attending the JUSTL programme was a fantastic experience for him. He said that he is really very grateful for his advisor, Prof Wise, allowing him to go to the MBL for two months when he was in the middle of his PhD training, and appreciated that many supervisors would not be as supportive for their students to take so much time away from their home laboratory. Dr Tse found the JUSTL programme to be especially appealing because every student could conduct their own project as a more-or-less independent investigator, should they so wish. He said that this provided students with invaluable experience at formulating their own hypothesis and testing it experimentally in an environment with the scientific support in-built with regard to people providing advice, state-of-the-art equipment and readily accessible resources. So he really appreciated the opportunity to work with zebrafish larvae under the guidance of Profs Miller and Baker, and indeed some of this work was included in Dr Tse’s PhD thesis. In addition, Dr Tse said that working in Prof Brady’s laboratory with the squid as a model of axonal transport, taught him that “once you have identified a suitable model to test your biological mechanism, then you have a secret weapon for your research.” Dr Tse still keeps in contact with Prof Brady who has visited Hong Kong on a number of occasions, and they often meet up at Society of Neuroscience meetings. Dr Tse has also kept in touch with the people who he met in Prof Brady’s laboratory at the MBL. These include Dr Yuyu Song, M.D., PhD, a graduate student and then post-doctoral researcher in Prof Brady’s laboratory, who is now a Research Fellow in Therapeutic Science at Harvard University. Like Dr Tse, she is working on neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease.
Dr Tse said that the JUSTL programme gave him his first taste of being an independent investigator as well as providing him with the opportunity to build up a network of international advisors and potential collaborators. He is also very grateful to Profs Miller and Baker for introducing him to the directors of the Neural Systems & Behaviour course, so that he could go into the laboratory when the course students were running experiments, and chat with people. All in all, Dr Tse found his eight weeks on the JUSTL programme to be an excellent experience all round. In light of the fact that the Hong Kong Government Education Bureau is promoting and facilitating STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education among teachers and students in the city, Dr Tse would like to see more programmes like JUSTL being organised to give the next generation of researchers the opportunity to work overseas. He says that being successful in science is all about international collaboration rather than staying in your home territory and that institutions such as the MBL, which attract scientists from all over the world for two or three months every summer, are excellent places for postgraduate students and junior faculty to meet people and gain confidence in their field.