Li-Huei Tsai
| Li-Huei Tsai | |
|---|---|
| Fields | Neuroscientist |
| Institutions | |
| Alma mater | University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center |
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Website tsailaboratory |
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Li-Huei Tsai is a cognitive neuroscientist and the director of the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
She is known for her work on neurological disorders that affect learning and memory, particularly for her research on Alzheimer’s disease and the role of CDK5 and chromatin remodeling in the progression of the disease.
Born in Taiwan, Tsai initially moved to the United States to pursue a Master’s in veterinary studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1984. After attending a series of lectures delivered by Nobel Prize laureate and cancer research Howard Temin, Tsai developed an interest in basic research. Changing her focus to cancer research, Tsai earned a PhD in 1990 from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. In 1991, Tsai joined the laboratory of Ed Harlow at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and then the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center. In 1994, Tsai joined the faculty in the Department of Pathology at Harvard Medical School, and moved to MIT 2006. She was appointed the director of the Picower Institute of Learning and Memory in 2009.
In the Harlow laboratory, Tsai studied cyclin-dependent kinases in order to identify their role in cell division. Tsai became interested in CDK5, which she found was not only inactive in cancer cells, but inactive in all other tissue cells except for the brain. She also found that Cdk5 requires p35 to be active.
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