Alice Y. Ting

Who is Alice Y. Ting?

Alice Yen-Ping Ting is Taiwanese-born American chemist. She is an associate professor in the department of chemistry at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Alice Ting was born in Taiwan and emigrated to the United States when she was three years old. She was raised in Texas and attended the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science. In 1991, she attended the prestigious Research Science Institute. She received her BS in Chemistry from Harvard in 1996, working with Nobel laureate E.J. Corey. She completed her Ph.D. with Peter G. Schultz from University of California, Berkeley in 2000. She completed her postdoctoral fellowship with 2008 Nobel Laureate Roger Y. Tsien.

She joined the MIT Chemistry Department in 2002 where she is now an Ellen Swallow Richards Associate Professor. Her research harnesses the power of natural enzymes to help image protein function in living cells. She has received a number of awards, including a 2008 NIH Director's Pioneer Award and a 2010 Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award from the American Chemical Society.

In February 2013, Cell retracted a 2010 report by Ting about a technique for creating images of interactions on living nerve cells at Ting's request. Ting's retraction noted that method in the paper could not be duplicated and said the data from a post-doc was faked. At the same time, Ting published a paper with a revised version of the method that is claimed to work better. The timeline of the retraction from Cell in 2013, the submission of the revised paper to PLOS in 2013, and the omission of the subsequently retracted paper from the Ting laboratory website since the fall of 2011, subjected Ting to criticism from the scientific community.