Profile

I’m 26 years old, and I grew up in Hong Kong. In 2007 I came to London for university and have stayed for postgraduate studies and my current position as a postdoc since then. It was a bit tough adjusting to the various accents but even I’m taking on a bit of a British accent even though everyone tells me I have an American one!

As someone who grew up in Chinese culture, expressions of love were often in the form of “have you eaten yet?” rather than hugs and kisses, so naturally I love food. When I’m at work, I plan my experiments around lunchtime. I love trying new restaurants and new recipes at home and I have a little food blog that I update once in a while. I’m a bit obsessed and I made a spreadsheet of all the restaurants I’ve liked in London and ones I have yet to try.

I have a wonderfully sweet cat named Honey whom I adopted from the RSPCA, but I actually had two dogs when I was younger too and I miss them a lot. If I could, I would have a pet rat as well – they are so cuddly! Unfortunately living in London means not a lot of space so I will have to wait until I get a bigger house to fit in all the animals.

In my free time I do Jiu Jitsu which is a type of martial arts, play video games, or I’m experimenting with baking recipes. I am constantly thinking of my next travel adventure (going to Japan in September)!

My work focuses on two organelles within brain cells: mitochondria and the endoplasmic reticulum. In healthy conditions, these organelles talk to each other to promote good “traffic” within the cell, helping to absorb excess ions as well as generate energy for the cell. In some brain diseases, the contacts between these two organelles appears to be broken. We think that the same thing could be happening in Alzheimer’s disease, which would then contribute to the brain cells becoming sick. If you have Alzheimer’s disease, molecules which normally are helpful to the cells, become sticky and clump together. We want to see whether these sticky molecules affect the contacts between the mitochondria and endoplasmic reticulum, and how to reverse it to hopefully stop the cells from dying.

At the moment, I grow cells in a dish which I then genetically manipulate to give them the proteins that form the sticky clumps. When that happens, I take the cells apart by smushing them up and down in some detergents to release all the proteins inside, so I can see what the toxic manipulation is doing to these proteins. Once we have an idea of whether the mitochondria and endoplasmic reticulum proteins are affected, we can more easily identify drugs to target these proteins. Eventually, this could contribute to treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and related brain diseases.

Yesterday, I checked my cells under a microscope to see if they were still alive. I fed them some more with nutrients to keep them going, and I also transferred them to a new flask to keep them happy because they’ll keep growing otherwise and get too crowded, which they don’t like. There was a plate of cells I was going to perform an experiment on, which was to look at the interaction between two proteins inside the cells. It involves breaking apart the cells and if the interaction is strong, the chemical reaction produces a glowing signal which a machine then reads. After that, I analyse my results on the computer and do some statistics.

Today, I taught my Master’s student a new technique on analysing cells under a microscope. I did some more statistical analysis of another experiment I performed last week, and made some graphs of the data to put in my lab book. In the afternoon, I volunteered at our Institute’s Open Day where I gave a lab demonstration to some members of the public. So as you can see, no day is ever the same!