I knew I wanted to be a scientist when… I was young and visited my dad’s lab. He’s a researcher in plants, and I used to set up little experiments and watch airborne microorganisms grow in tissue culture media. I also loved observing insects in nature, which triggered my interest in bioscience.
I love being a scientist at WEHI because… we have a diverse, innovative and collaborative culture. I was in InSPIRE (International Student Program in Research Experience) at WEHI, and I remember being really impressed with how everyone worked together across labs and gathered in the tearoom for meals and chats.
One of the biggest challenges I’ve overcome was… the language barrier. When I first came to Australia from China, it was very hard to express myself in English and understand others. I’m an extrovert so it was frustrating that I couldn’t contribute to the conversation!
One of the coolest things I’ve been able to do as a scientist is… develop a pipeline for analysing mouse methylation array data using R (a coding language used for statistical analysis) within 10 weeks, when I was a third-year bachelor student with minimum knowledge of coding.
The most inspiring person I’ve met at WEHI is… my supervisor, Professor Kate Sutherland. She’s my role model as she’s a very passionate scientist with great work-life balance and has uncovered so many mechanisms of lung cancer.
I aspire to make a meaningful impact on patients’ lives through… studying the mechanisms of tumour metastasis, therapy resistance and immune evasion in small cell lung cancer. These are the three barriers that we need to solve to help patients to live longer. I hope I can find novel mechanisms that can serve as new treatment targets, to bring hope to more patients.
For me, collaboration means… putting different perspectives and different people’s wisdom together to achieve something bigger.
When I meet someone new, I explain what I do as… fighting against cancer supervillains with various superpowers! Cancer is a complex puzzle which we’re working to solve using different approaches such as single cell technologies and advanced laboratory models.
When I’m not in the lab, I like to… hang out with friends, explore different restaurants and go to the seaside to take beautiful pictures.
