Originally I was born in China and moved to the United States at age 5. I grew up in Ames, Iowa where my parents attended graduate school at Iowa State. My mom and I later moved to Minnesota and there I attended middle and high school in Edina, a suburb of Minneapolis. In high school, I became involved with many extracurricular activities, such as policy debate and mock trial, many of which have come to define the way I approach issues and potential solutions.
Wanted to learn and sharpen problem-solving skills, I went to pursue my bachelors degree at the University of Michigan in Biomedical Engineering. Throughout my time there, I was constantly asked the questions “Why are you doing BioMed?”, to which I usually replied “Because, I like it!”. While this is a good and sufficient answer to most things in life, I investigated myself further to pinpoint the underlying reason of why I like BioMed. The conclusions that I frequently came to was as follows:
- I liked Engineering, I like building and designing things.
- There are many hardships the world; all people have pains and demons that they face on a daily basis. However, people that have diseases that significantly affect quality of life (cancer, autoimmune diseases etc.) suffer much more than, for example, not being able to find a cheap place to stay while on vacation. I want to develop technologies that could significantly improve peoples’ qualities of life. Biomedical and pharmaceutical industries are fields that I feel, could potentially be life saving and life changing to huge numbers of people.
- Biotech is an exploding industry. I think it is very exciting to brainstorm think of new ideas that could be implemented and have real world impacts.
Currently, I’m pursuing a PhD at Princeton University in Dr. Robert Prud’homme’s group, researching and developing new nanoparticle technologies for cancer diagnostic imaging.