Li-Huei Tsai

Li-Huei Tsai is the Picower Professor of Neuroscience and Director of the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT. She also serves as Co-Director of the Alana Down Syndrome Center and a Senior Associate Member at the Broad Institute. Her research focuses on Alzheimer’s disease and neurological disorders impacting learning/memory, employing multidisciplinary approaches including molecular biology, electrophysiology, computational biology, and bioengineering. She leads groundbreaking studies on non-invasive sensory stimulation (GENUS) to mitigate Alzheimer’s pathologies, lipid metabolism in neurodegeneration (e.g., APOE4 effects), and genomic analyses of Alzheimer’s mechanisms using single-cell transcriptomics.

Her work reveals cellular impacts of genetic risk factors (e.g., ABCA7 variants) and identifies therapeutic candidates like CDP-choline and cyclodextrin. She has pioneered research on neuronal DNA damage and its role in neuroinflammation/epigenomic erosion. Her lab investigates microglial states in disease progression and brain rhythms’ therapeutic potential. Tsai’s contributions bridge basic science and clinical translation, with ongoing human trials for GENUS.

Labs/Teams: Tsai Laboratory (tsailaboratory.mit.edu). Collaborations span neurobiology, engineering, and computational fields. Current projects include exploring glymphatic clearance mechanisms, iPSC-derived in vitro systems for disease modeling, and systems-level analyses of neuronal circuit dysfunction in neurodegeneration.