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Selected Achievements to Date
- Published ten peer-reviewed articles in immunology, oncology, developmental biology, cancer biology, medicinal chemistry, and tissue engineering.
- Built the first multicellular model of neuroblastoma.
- Devised a multi-approach and multi-scale method to model the immune system.
- Proposed a theory about the chemical basis of lymphangiogenesis.
- Honoured by the Mensa Foundation with the International Intellectual Benefits to Society Award.
- Awarded over 120k GBP by various institutions to fund my education and research on five continents.
Education
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Bioengineering
I worked with Professor Tiina Roose during my doctoral research at the University of Southampton in the UK. In this period, I was supported by an EPSRC studentship awarded by the Faculty of Engineering and the Environment; it covered my tuition, research-related expenses, and a stipend. To facilitate my thesis research, I took courses in numerical methods and mathematical biology in the mathematics department. I was also involved in the yoga society and chess club at the university. I defended my thesis successfully less than three years after starting the degree in February in 2014. My thesis title is Mathematical Modelling of Lymphangiogenesis.
Master of Science (MS), Chemical Engineering, 3.60/4.00
When I was a graduate student at Columbia University in the City of New York in the USA, I was supported by a departmental scholarship, which covered my tuition, fees, and a stipend. I took advanced courses in transport phenomena, chemical kinetics, and thermodynamics, as well as a general research methodology course in my department. I went way beyond my comfort zone by taking graduate-level courses in other departments even though I did not have the prerequisites, including partial differential equations (applied maths), statistical mechanics (applied physics), quantitative methods in cell biology (interdisciplinary), and molecular biophysics (biochemistry and molecular biophysics). I developed my research interests further through research projects in the areas of biophysics, image analysis, and molecular simulation. After passing my qualifying examination and getting the MS degree, I was offered the option to pursue a funded doctoral degree in the department. However, I transferred to Southampton to work on developmental biology after fall 2013.
Master of Engineering (MEng), Chemical Engineering, First-Class Honours
Between 2008 and 2012, I was an undergraduate student at Imperial College London, where I received a solid education in chemical engineering, including courses, lab work, and group projects. I also took an elective course in biomechanics in the bioengineering department. In my final year, I was involved in two major projects. In the first term, a lab partner and I completed a research project about Alzheimer's disease. In the second term, I worked with nine coursemates to design a process with an annual capacity of 515 tonnes of S-ibuprofen–S-lysine. Throughout the degree, I was inspired by my personal tutor, Doctor Jawahar Krishnan, to develop my interest in theoretical biology. I helped run the yoga club at Imperial too. I graduated with an integrated master's degree.
Exchange Year, Chemical Engineering, First-Class Honours
On the strength of my academic excellence and performance at a panel interview, I was awarded a tuition fee waiver (50 %) by Imperial College London to spend the 2010–2011 academic year at the University of Sydney in Australia. In addition to chemical engineering courses, I took electives in biochemical engineering, cellular biophysics, and membrane science. During the Christmas/summer holiday, I worked in a tissue engineering research group. My grade was converted by Imperial College London according to an official scale.
International Baccalaureate, 44/45
From 2006 to 2008, I attended Sevenoaks School, a boarding school in the UK. I studied mathematics (higher level), chemistry (higher level), biology (higher level), economics (standard level), Mandarin (standard level B), English literature (standard level A1), and theory of knowledge. While researching for my extended essay, I used high-performance liquid chromatography to find out the caffeine levels in different energy drinks. I won the Science Faculty, GlaxoSmithKline Science, and Mathematics Prizes. I was a part of the school ground force and the chairman of my house. In 2007, I took part in the UK Senior Mathematical Challenge and won a gold certificate, thus earning an invitation to participate in the 2007/08 British Mathematical Olympiad. I also entered a science essay competition organised by Peterhouse, Cambridge and won a commendation.
Certificates
Introduction to Computer Vision
In November and December 2023, I was introduced to the fundamentals of computer vision in this Udacity course, such as colour space conversions, smoothing, edge detection, shape detection (Hough transform and corner detection), erosion, dilation, image segmentation (contouring and clustering), object recognition (Haar cascades), and feature extraction (ORB and HOG). Then, I learnt to build convolutional neural networks and visualise their features.
Building Generative Adversarial Networks
In September and October 2023, I learnt to build various types of generative adversarial networks in this Udacity course, including the basic GAN, DCGAN, CGAN, CycleGAN, WGAN, WGAN-GP, ProGAN, and StyleGAN.
200-Hour Yoga Teacher Training
I completed my training under the tutelage of Ann-Marie Mainprize in 2023. My peers and I spent 10 months studying over 120 asanas and therapeutic techniques, intelligent sequencing, pranayama, meditation and relaxation techniques, functional anatomy, subtle anatomy, physiology, and yoga philosophy. Through micro-teaching and receiving feedback from each other, we developed practical skills in demonstration, providing verbal cues, alignment awareness, adjustment, and modification. In October 2023, 15 years after my first yoga class, I was certified by Yoga Alliance Professionals as a registered yoga teacher 200RYT. This accreditation is an internationally recognised qualification.
Natural Language Processing Specialisation
In the summer of 2023, I completed a series of NLP courses offered by DeepLearning.AI via Coursera. In the first course, I mastered the fundamentals of NLP, including text preprocessing techniques, logistic regression (sentiment analysis), Naive Bayes classification (sentiment analysis), word vectors (embeddings), principal component analysis, the bag-of-words model, the k-nearest neighbours algorithm, and locality-sensitive hashing. In the second course, I learnt to use dynamic programming for autocorrection, hidden Markov models for part-of-speech tagging, n-grams language models to autocomplete sentences, and CBOW models to compute word embeddings. In the third course, I became conversant with the use of deep neural networks for NLP. I built a feedforward network for sentiment analysis, a recurrent neural network with gated recurrent units for autocompletion, a long short-term memory network to locate and classify named entities, and a Siamese network comprising two LSTM subnetworks to identify duplicate questions. In the final course, I was introduced to the attention mechanism and several transformers. I built an encoder-decoder model comprising LSTMs and the scaled dot product attention mechanism for English-to-German translation, a transformer decoder using the masked self-attention (autoregressive or causal attention) mechanism for text summarisation, a transformer encoder (BERT) for question answering, and a chatbot based on the reformer model.
Genomic Data Science Specialisation
At different points in 2020 and 2021, I took a set of bioinformatics courses offered by Johns Hopkins University via Coursera. I learnt about genomic technologies such as WGS, WES, RNASeq, ChIPSeq, and bisulfite sequencing; algorithms for sequence alignment and assembly; bioinformatics pipelines such as variant calling and the Tuxedo pipeline for RNASeq data; biostatistics; and bioinformatics tools including the Galaxy platform, Bash scripting, Bioconductor, R, and Python. I secured a development opportunity grant from the Engineering Researcher Society of the University of Sheffield to fund the courses.
Machine Learning Engineer Nanodegree
Between March and November in 2018, I completed this Udacity programme. I took courses in supervised (regression and classification), unsupervised (clustering and dimensionality reduction), deep, and reinforcement learning. Then, I designed and implemented a capstone project, carrying out a series of studies using a dataset from a pan-cancer analysis of paediatric cancers.
Whole-Cell Modelling Workshop
While working at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, I was awarded a travel grant to attend a whole-cell modelling workshop at the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, Spain in September 2017. I learnt multiple modelling techniques and how to combine them to describe a cell holistically.
Test Scores
Cattell Culture Fair III A Intelligence Test, 157
Percentile rank: 99. The Cattell Culture Fair III A Intelligence Test contains only diagrammatic reasoning problems.
Cattell III B Intelligence Test, 154
Percentile rank: 98. The Cattell III B Intelligence Test contains mostly verbal reasoning problems.
Mensa Wonderlic, 32
Percentile rank: 95. The Mensa Wonderlic assesses general cognitive ability.
RAIT Quantitative Intelligence Index, 148
Percentile rank: 99. The quantitative sections of the Reynolds Adaptable Intelligence Test (RAIT) assess both crystallised intelligence and fluid intelligence with quantitative reasoning problems.
RAIT Total Battery Intelligence Index, 472
Percentile rank: 98. The Reynolds Adaptable Intelligence Test (RAIT) is a rapid, reliable, and valid intelligence test composed of seven sections that assess crystallised intelligence, fluid intelligence, and quantitative aptitude or intelligence.