Richard Z. Lin, MD
Associate Professor of Medicine and Physiology & Biophysics
Department of Medicine
Stony Brook University School of Medicine
Dr. Lin’s long-term career goals are to function as an academic clinical pharmacologist with special expertise in geriatrics and conduct fundamental research on the aging process and its effect on therapeutics.
He has always wanted to pursue a research career in academic medicine. After his undergraduate studies at Columbia University, Dr. Lin attended medical school at the University of California-San Francisco. After two years of preclinical studies, he interrupted his medical education to enroll in the Masters of Public Health program at the University of California-Berkeley. Upon graduating from medical school, Dr. Lin received a NIH/National Library of Medicine fellowship to study Medical Informatics at Stanford’s graduate program.
Upon completing his graduate studies, Dr. Lin wanted to continue his clinical training and entered the internal medicine residency program at Stanford. For subspecialty training, he devised a combined hematology/clinical pharmacology fellowship at Stanford. The first phase of his fellowship was devoted to clinical training in hematology and bone marrow transplantation. The second phase involved training in clinical pharmacology and conducting research in Dr. Brian Hoffman's laboratory based at the Palo Alto VA GRECC.
Since Dr. Lin’s faculty appointment in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, he has established a laboratory that is actively investigating how the aging process affects the cardiovascular system at the cellular and molecular levels. During his clinical training, it was clear to him that the effects of pharmacologic treatments on the elderly patient were clearly different from those on younger patients. Elderly patients were not only less able to withstand the stress of their disease but also therapeutic interventions. This was often attributed to the geriatric patient’s poor constitution without any clear scientific understanding as to the role of the aging process itself. As a result, furthering the understanding of the aging process and its effect on disease processes and therapeutics became one of Dr. Lin’s motivating research goals.
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