Dr. Lin's research interest focuses on characterizing oncogenic roles of genomic amplification in the development and progression of human esophageal adenocarcinoma using the technologies of two-dimensional restriction landmark genomic scanning, FISH, CGH and array-CGH, and gene expression profiling. She implemented the STS Amplification Mapping approach to fine map the core domains of chromosomal regions with increased DNA copy number, in which candidate genes are selected by the amplification events during tumor development and/or progression. These research efforts led a Young Investigator Award from the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) in 1999. In her recent studies, she has located a series of microsatellite polymorphic markers within the 8p22-p23 amplicon that refines the core amplified region to less than 0.5 Mb in chromosome 8p and that limits the amplification-driving candidates to less than five genes. Functional characterization of the 8p22-p23 candidate genes in esophageal tumor development is currently an ongoing project. Dr. Lin also works on characterizing the osteopontin (SSP1/OPN) protein, a gene highly overexpressed in esophageal adenocarcinoma that has been shown to be involved in tumor cell invasion and metastasis in other cancers. Dr. Lin's other ongoing projects involve identifying novel genomic amplification events in esophageal adenocarcinoma by analyzing array-CGH findings in combination with Affymetrix gene expression profiling data.