David Lin is a fourth year medical student at Harvard Medical School. David grew up in California and attended Stanford University, where he majored in Mathematics and Computational Sciences. His senior thesis involved using computational methods to model the distribution of stem cells within brain tumors. After graduation from college, David was awarded a two-year pre-doctoral fellowship at Yale School of Medicine to study models of visual attention in children with autism. Here, David applied his computational background to explore what children with autism find salient in the world around them. This work resulted in a second author publication in the journal, Nature.
David is currently in the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program at Harvard Medical School. During his preclinical years, he worked in the laboratory of Dr. Chinfei Chen, a neurologist at Children’s Hospital Boston, where he used electrophysiological techniques to study synaptic plasticity in the visual system. After his second year of medical school, he was awarded a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Fellowship to pursue this work full time for one year. This research has been recognized in a variety of conference forums, winning best poster prizes in both basic science as well as physiology and systems biology at Harvard and MIT. He is currently writing the results from his research for his medical school thesis as well as for publication.
During his advanced clinical neurology rotation at Massachusetts General Hospital, David worked with Dr. Jeremy Schmahmann in clinic and met many patients with cerebellar ataxias and multiple system atrophy. These patients and their families captured his compassion, pushing him to realize the limits of our knowledge about neurodegenerative diseases of the cerebellum and prompting him want to learn more.
David is excited to be joining the MindLink team to start to investigate the natural history of the neurodegenerative disorders of the cerebellum. He will start by working with Dr. Schmahmann on better characterizing the progression of multiple systems atrophy.
David will be applying for residency in adult neurology this coming year.
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