Dr. Xia completed his MD at Hunan Medical University in China and his PhD in neuroscience at the University of Tuebingen in Germany. Dr. Xia was initially trained as a clinician and worked as a neurologist for eight years in China. Due to his enthusiasm for medical research, Dr. Xia eventually becomes a neuroscientist whose research is focused on neurodegenerative diseases, including Parkinson’s disease. Since he started his own lab in 2006, Dr. Xia has established the techniques to produce transgenic rats and has created a number of transgenic rats that express human genes associated with neurodegenerative diseases. With these novel mammalian models, Dr. Xia’s lab is aims to determine how mutation of human genes causes neuronal death and induces neurodegenerative diseases, providing theoretic guidance to the development of therapies for Parkinson’s and the other neurodegenerative diseases.