Lulu Y. Chen Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
chenly@uci.edu
949-824-3503
Dr. Chen immigrated to the U.S. when she was 16 years old, and she completed her GED by attending both high school and adult school in California. She received her B.S. from the California State University, Long Beach, where she was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute scholar in Biological Sciences and completed her undergraduate honors thesis in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry with Dr. Kensaku Nakayama.
She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine, under the mentorship of Dr. Christine Gall in the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology with the NIMH pre-doctoral NRSA fellowship award. During her graduate training with Drs. Christine Gall and Gary Lynch; focused on investigating the synaptic mechanisms underlying long-term potentiation and memory consolidation, and identified learning-induced activation of neurotrophic signaling in adult synapses.
To further investigate the deep connections between synapses, brain function, and cognitive disorders, she conducted her post-doctoral training at Stanford University with Dr. Thomas Südhof (Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine 2013) in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology with support from NIMH post-doctoral NRSA fellowship award. Her work focused on functional characterization and molecular dissection of the development and maintenance of synapses using novel conditional knockout mouse models of adhesion molecules implicated in many psychiatric disorders.
Dr. Chen is now a faculty member in the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology and the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at UC Irvine. Her lab, established in Oct. 2018, focuses on understanding the neuronal mechanisms underlying basic cognitive processes implicated in neuropsychiatric disorders such as Autism Spectrum Disorder, Epilepsy, and intellectual disabilities.