Celebrating the 3-year Anniversary of the Fang Lab at UiO

It has been such a wonderful, happy, memorable, and fruitful 3-year career development journey at the lovely the University of Oslo (UiO), and the Akershus University Hospital (Ahus), Oslo, Norway.

I opened the Fang Lab UiO on the 2nd Oct. 2017, one month after I finished my 5.5-year postdoc with Prof. Dr. Vilhelm A. Bohr at the National Institute on Ageing (NIA), Baltimore, USA. After only about 20 days, I had my 1st student Nica (Domenica Caponio) from southern Italy joined my group. Nica had since then became a multi-faceted member of the Fang lab: she was a Ph.D. exchange student and needed to design and run the experiments; she was the lab manager to a team of two to over 5+ in a few months, for ordering, maintenance etc; she was also a friend of me, we worked closely together hand by hand and built the lab platforms…Today, the Fang Lab is growing to be a big lab with 15+ trainees come from many different countries; within 3 years, we have students from a total of 11 countries associated with the Fang lab. And this month, we will also welcome Nica to join us as a postdoc!

The Fang lab is doing ´Molecular Mechanisms of Human Ageing and Age-related Neurodegeneration´ at international level. We have more than 10 projects going on here, covering from the molecular mechanisms of ageing, developing strategies to turning up mitophagy to forestall memory loss in Alzheimer´s disease (AD), to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to identify lead compounds for healthy longevity and AD. In the past three years, the Fang Lab has published over 10 papers, including papers in Nature Neuroscience (Fang EF et al., 2019), Cell Metabolism (Lautrup et al., 2019), and Ageing Research Reviews (Fang EF et al., 2020). The Fang lab has also been very successful in securing external funding from Norway (e.g., HSØ, RCN), EU (e.g., Marie Curie, KAPPA (Czech Republic-Norway joint grant, ranked 2nd over a total of 154 grants), and China (e.g., NSFC). The Fang lab is actively doing ´bench-top to bed-side´research: in collaboration with clinicians, the Fang lab is going to lead one NAD+-based clinical trial, and has been participated as a key member in 5+ NAD+ clinical trials. The Fang lab is very active in National and International ageing societies as Dr. Fang is a major player of the NO-Age network, the NO-AD network, the Hong Kong-Nordic Research Network, and the NO-Age and NO-AD Seminar Series, a new editor of the leading ageing journal Ageing Research Reviews (and other journals), and has been given over 50 talks in national/international meetings and in leading research universities worldwide. The Fang lab discoveries have been recognized by DKNVS and other prestigious scientific societies, and have been reported in national and international main-stream media, including the Norwegian largest Newspaper VG.

Invited by UiO, today I also gave a talk on ´Independent Career Development´to share my personal experience to the postdocs and young researchers who are on the stage of developing their independent careers. The video is here.

The achievements of the Fang Lab are contributed by each and every former and current members of the Fang Lab! I thank my former postdoc mentor and friend Prof. Vilhelm A. Bohr, and my career mentors and collaborators Profs. Hilde L. Nilsen, Jon Storm-Mathisen, and Linda H. Bergersen, and my many national and international collaborators and friends for their continued and unconditioned supports and helps.

I am looking forward to working with the current and new members of the Fang Lab, and collaborators, to make new breakthroughs in both basic research and in drug development!