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Headlines 13 He got his PhD in 2015. “Typically when you get your PhD you think about going overseas to a prestigious school to further your career. You have to commit to your work 100%. Being a parent for the first time with two infants, I was not confident enough to pull this off.” Instead, he and Yewon chose to stay. Professor Montgomery offered him a position as a postdoctoral fellow, continuing with autism research. Kevin convinced Yewon to switch from breast cancer research and come into the lab as a technician. They split the postdoctoral position 50/50. The downside of all this was he was not committing to anything fulltime – his work felt like a mosaic. “I felt I didn’t ‘own’ one fully-committed project that would establish my independence.” Then he was approached by brilliant brain cancer researcher Dr Thomas Park, who is the ‘bridge’ between surgeons at Auckland Hospital and scientists at the Centre for Brain Research (see pages 6-7). “His work involved keeping the neurons alive after surgery,” says Kevin. “He would take the tissue sample apart to select and then grow the neurons. But that was like taking a whole piece of multigrain bread then selecting a few tiny chia seeds from it. You’re tearing apart tissue and damaging cells, so it’s hard for them to survive. “So I said there’s a better way of growing the tissue. Why not cut the tissue into slices and grow it all, keeping all the brain cells as viable as possible – neurons, support cells, brain resident immune cells, blood vessels – the neural network and circuitry?” he says. “That’s the closest we can get to a human model – it’s the human brain at a cellular level. Studies done on mice brains just aren’t enough, because they’re not human. It’s because of courageous patients’ families that we get this tissue donated.” In 2018, Kevin got a small project grant from the Neurological Foundation to copy a method used in France (Professor Mike Dragunow had chatted with him about it) and it worked. “It boosted my confidence. It gave me a solid project.” He used that preliminary data to apply for the Neurological Foundation Senior Research Fellowship which he received in 2019. His research was at an exciting stage. “So now we had the most complicated live tissue model of the human brain, can we make it undergo neuroinflammation? If it’s acute, neuroinflammation in the brain is good. But in diseases where it’s continuous, it’s bad.” Kevin was about to start when COVID-19 hit. The first lockdown happened in March. He asked the Foundation for a postponement until June. But by then everything was on hold — the collaboration between hospital and lab disintegrated and no tissue was available. “Everything stopped,” he says. At this point, Kevin was delighted by the understanding shown by the Neurological Foundation through providing salary support during lockdown. “I would like to express my gratitude towards the Neurological Foundation and donors because the Foundation understood the situation and supported me. Otherwise, I don’t know how I would have survived.” In total, the Foundation provided Kevin with an additional seven months of salary. Kevin completed his fellowship using mouse models, then took up his current position at University of California San Francisco in mid-2023 under a principal investigator who is a neuropathologist. Kevin, who still considers NZ home, dreams of making a genuine, lasting difference for humanity. “I want to keep working, researching – I want to do something big for the world. I said this at the interview for my first summer studentship: I want to win a Nobel prize. “The brain is the most interesting and complex organ to study and it’s the most difficult organ to achieve successful clinical interventions. The brain has endless mysteries. If possible, I want to be one of those amazing people who can break through.” L to R: Benedict Lee, Kevin, Bella Langlois and Nesta Lade (Honours students), Zoe Mills (PhD student), Ka Heay Lee (Masters student), Yewon Jung (Kevin’s wife and fellow researcher) and Patrick Lee.