I moved from Guangzhou, China to Vancouver, Canada to pursue my undergradate degree at the University of British Columbia!

I didn't know then what I was getting myself into nor did I know what I wanted to do in the future, but that was exactly why I wanted to move out of my comfort zone and see a bigger world.

I decided to pursue a combined major of Microbiology & Immunology and Computer Science link.

At that time, I simply was amazed that CS made sense to me, so I thought that it would be fantastic to do both CS and biology (which I knew I would love). Back then, I didn't know bioinformatics was trending up or I might end up doing a PhD in this field.

I joined UBC iGEM link, a student-led multidisciplinary research team that leverages synthetic biology to solve problems in the real life.

I turned to extracurriculars for opportunities to integrate CS and biology, and stumbled across this team that transformed my undergrad. Over the three years I have been on the team, I learnt skills in wet lab doing benchwork, in dry lab in building in silico models, and in leadership as the team director.

Myself, along with a few other core members of the team, wrote our experience up into a book chapter:
Chen, X. E., King, S., Ng, S. W., Salman, P., Schwab, J. C., & Sekhon, P. (2023). Young innovators and the bioeconomy. In Genomics and the Global Bioeconomy (pp. 83-100). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-323-91601-1.00005-5

Intrigued about research, I joined Dr. Alex Wyatt's lab link as a bioinformatics Co-op student. The lab focuses on utilizing circulating tumor DNA to study advanced prostate and bladder cancer genomes and to find biomarkers to direct precision treatment. Desipte COVID situations, I gained experience in sequencing data analysis, bioinformatic pipeline development, and I was fortunate to learn after a team of brilliant scientists.

Herberts, C.^†, Annala, M.^†, Sipola, J.^†, Ng, S. W., Chen, X. E., Nurminen, A., ... & Wyatt, A. W. (2022). Deep whole-genome ctDNA chronology of treatment-resistant prostate cancer. Nature, 608(7921), 199-208.
Sperger, J. M.^†, Emamekhoo, H.^†, McKay, R. R.^†, Stahlfeld, C. N., Singh, A., Chen, X. E., ... & Lang, J. M. (2021). Prospective evaluation of clinical outcomes using a multiplex liquid biopsy targeting diverse resistance mechanisms in metastatic prostate cancer. Journal of Clinical Oncology, 39(26), 2926-2937.

During my time at the Wyatt lab, I collaborated with Dr. Peter Black's lab, a neighboring lab, on a study on profiling multiomic features of metastatic bladder cancer tumors that had extraordinary response to chemotherapy.

This is my last year of undergraduate degree! This year, I joined Dr. Carl de Boer's lab link for a Directed Studies project link, because I wanted to gain more experience in hybrid lab with both experimental and computational research. Dr. de Boer's research focuses on learning the language of DNA cis-regulatory elements by performing high throughput experiments and applying machine learning models to understand the resulting data. Not only did I got to learn more about designing experiments, tickering around established deep learning models, and working with great mentors in both fields!

One other thing struck me at the de Boer lab was how much of a community feeling I got at the School of Biomedical Engineering (SBME). People in that community have regular social interactions which facilitates research collaboration and nice working environments.

I got into graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania at the program of Genomics and Computatiaonal Biology!

I have just finished a rotation at Dr. Andy Minn's lab link who focuses on interferon signalling in cancers that contribute to resistance in cancer radiation and immunotherapies.