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The Research · Reading the Body
I Have Been Asking the Same Question for Years
My grandfather is the last of six brothers. The others — including his mother — all died of cancer. He refuses to go to the hospital for a checkup. He is afraid of what they might find. I understand. I have seen what that knowledge does to a family.
I don't know if science can change this. But I have spent the last few years trying to find out — one project at a time, one question at a time.
How do we help people live better — and longer — and with more dignity?
01 · 2024
Dauers on a Diet
Summer Research Academy · UC Santa Barbara · Jun–Jul 2024
"What if the secret to living longer was already written inside a worm?"
My first real laboratory. I investigated the relationship between dietary-restriction-induced DAF-16 activation and mitochondrial heteroplasmy in C. elegans — a worm so small it lives its entire life on an agar plate.
I was terrified of handling the specimens. So I let my labmate do it, and I took notes. I spent most of my time reading papers I only half-understood, and finding references for references. It wasn't glamorous. But something shifted: I started to see that living longer wasn't just a wish — it was a molecular question. And molecular questions have answers.
"I didn't learn how to be a scientist that summer. I learned what it felt like to want to become one."
"Back home, my grandfather still wouldn't go to the hospital. I kept thinking: what if the question wasn't how to treat cancer — but how to prevent it entirely?"
Enhanced DC transfection, maturation and antigen-presentation efficacy by creating a targeted delivery carrier of mRNA vaccine toward immune dendritic cells
International Journal of Biology and Life Sciences · Published 2026
View Paper →02 · 2024–2026
Designing the Message
S.-T. Yau High School Science Award · International Journal of Biology and Life Sciences · Jun 2024–Jan 2026
"During the pandemic, a vaccine stopped a virus. What if cancer had a vaccine too?"
Under mentorship, I researched mRNA vaccine delivery systems and sequence design for cancer and infectious disease applications. The central challenge: how do you get a strand of RNA — fragile, temporary, precise — to reach exactly the right cell and instruct it to defend the body?
I spent over a year reading, designing, and rewriting. The research was eventually published in the International Journal of Biology and Life Sciences. But what I remember most is the moment I understood, really understood, how mRNA works — and thought: my grandfather's brothers didn't have to die the way they did.
"A precisely written strand of RNA can instruct the immune system to defend itself. Science, I realized, is a form of language."
03 · 2024–2025
Blood Test, Reimagined
China Thinks Big (CTB) · Group Leader · Jun 2024–Mar 2025
"My grandfather won't go to the hospital. What if the hospital could come to him?"
I led a team to research and develop a portable, affordable point-of-care blood testing device for medical centers in suburban areas and elderly individuals with limited healthcare access.
The question behind this project was personal: what happens when the people who most need medical care are the ones least likely to seek it — because it's too far, too expensive, or too frightening? We designed for them.
"The body's needs don't stop at the city's edge. Neither should science."
"I kept asking: what if we didn't just treat the body — what if we could redesign it? Not to change what it is, but to help it become what it was meant to be."
04 · 2025
Rewriting the Gut
iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machine) · Wet Team Leader · Jun–Dec 2025
"If we can rewrite the genetic code of a bacterium, what does it mean that life has a fixed nature at all?"
As Wet Team Leader, I led the engineering of E. coli Nissle 1917 as a probiotic intervention for sarcopenia and mood disorders in elderly populations. The modified strain continuously produces HMB to combat muscle atrophy and serotonin for neurological support, regulated by an L-arabinose-responsive biocontainment system for safety.
This project started with a question about aging. It ended with a deeper one: if we can redesign a living organism to serve human health, what are our responsibilities to the systems we change? My IB Philosophy classes had prepared me for this question. My wet lab work made it urgent.
"The most interesting science always becomes a philosophy problem eventually."
05 · 2025–2026
The Dark Chapter
The Concord Review · Submitted 2026
"Science is never just science. It is always also history, power, and the question of who gets to decide."
After teaching "Civilization on a Needle's Tip" in Building Bridges, a teacher pulled me aside and asked: "Have you studied the darker chapters of vaccine history?" I had. I had just chosen not to go there.
I spent the next year filling in the pages I had left blank — reading about the Tuskegee experiments, the polio vaccine contamination, the ethics of mandatory vaccination. The resulting essay, submitted to The Concord Review, is my attempt to hold both things at once: the extraordinary power of vaccines to save lives, and the ways that power has been misused.
View Paper →"Writing is another way of reading — forcing precision, demanding clarity, refusing easy answers."
Where This Is Going
Biology Is Not a Subject.
It Is a System.
I started these projects thinking about molecules and mechanisms. I ended up thinking about people — about my grandfather who won't go to the hospital, about the children in rural Yunnan who have never seen a science experiment, about the patients in hospital corridors who close their eyes when I play piano.
Human Biology is not a discipline. It is the study of what it means to be alive — in a body, in a family, in a world that is sometimes generous and sometimes not. That is what I want to spend my life understanding.
"Every project is a different instrument. The question underneath is always the same."