Our major research interest is to dissect the molecular mechanisms that underline neuronal development and neural degeneration diseases. Particularly, I’m interested in how autophagy/lysosomal pathway and mitochondrial functions contribute to neuronal health maintenance.

Our goal is to identify novel players and to define molecular pathways in neural development and maintenance by using fruit flies and mice as model systems. We hope our study can provide clues for clinical treatments of cognitive diseases and neural degeneration. Meanwhile, we hope our study could expand our understanding of the general autophagy/lysosomal pathway which is also involved in multiple important physiological and pathological processes such as immune-response and cancer in addition to neural health maintenance.