Hi, I’m glad you stopped by! I’m currently an MPhil student at CUHK studying Biomedical Sciences, but unlike traditional biomedical scientists, I rarely engage in wet-lab experiments. Instead, I like approaching biomedical problems in quantitative ways.
Why bioinformatics/computational?
I didn’t decide to devote my academic career in dry-labs until I started to appreciate the elegance of automated workflows. I worked on my first ever bioinformatics project when I was just finishing my freshman year. We were allowed to choose to attach to different labs and work on a certain thesis, and I happened to chose the very same lab that I ended up doing my bachelor’s and master’s thesis in. Why I interned here wasn’t the main point, but I was simply amazed by how SNPs from GWAS studies allowed us to infer casual relationships! (Using Mendelian Randomization) It blew my pure biology approached mind! But the program’s expectation held me back, because we were expected to have excellent wet-lab skills as part of our assessments. I’ve attached in another lab, trying to ‘find myself under the radar’, but eventually gave in and worked solely on computational work. As I learn more about myself, I’ve decided to work on basic computational skills like C++, Python and data structures. The more I went into this rabbit hole, the more I’m determined in pursuing a career in bioinformatics. (But of course, as I gain more experience in this field, I understand that the bioinformatics I’m interested in is much much more about statistics and maths than anything else)
But I am ultimately a biomedical scientist, and I want to contribute to the corpus of biomedical knowledge instead of simply publishing and creating computational models that don’t have much clinical applicability. When I started out, I was interested in a handful of topics, psychiatric diseases, cancer informatics, computational neuroscience etc. But I think I have found my true passion among these topics, and that is cancer.