Welcome~ This is a page about me and stuff I am interested in :)

I’d like to start with a peice of advice from the Sunscreen Song:

“Enjoy your body. It’s the greatest instrument you’ll even own.”
     —Sunscreen Song by Mary Schmich

The topics I take great interests in concern moslty of biology and computing. For for info about me, check out my CV.

Biology Is Awesome

The human body is an intricate machine.

Understanding human biology, the process I would like to think as documenting the Human User Manual, is a hard and intriguing problem.

We have yet to fully understand the function of sleep, the cause of aging and various diseases, how the cocktail of neurochemical molecules shape our mental and physical states, and lead to fascinating (and sometimes bizarre) human behaviors.

Where Computer Comes in

The rapid increase of the computing power allows us to process huge amount data and perform massive searches, and to implement more intelligent models (like AlphaFold2 with its 21 million parameters network).

Computation offers us greater tools than ever to understand biology, and I wish to make a small contribution to that.

I’ll breifly talk about 3 fields here: Computational Protein Design (my grad research), Genomics (what I am curious to explore) and Programing (an activity I enjoy a ton).

Computational Protein Design/Engineering

• My graduate research focuses on solving the protein design problem - the reverse problem of the protein folding problem (the one Google’s AlphaFold2 AI solves).
• Very briefly, the design problem is given the protein’s 3D backbone structure, can we find the amino acid sequence(s) that fold into the predeterimined structure?
• It allows us to create brand new proteins outside of evolution, and modify exisiting proteins with desired functionalities without disturbing the folded structure.
• For more details of my projects, see Research page.

Genomics and Next Generation Sequencing

• The DNA - our source code, contains fascinating information about our biology. For example, a single mutation will decide whether your face flushes after consuming alcohol (guess which genotype I am); another mutation can decide whether you need deorderant for your life; or if cilantro tastes like soap to you. There are genes found to be associated with depression, aggression, pro-/anti-social behaviors and cognitions.
• The human body is the most intricate machine we will ever own, yet we still haven’t figured out the user manual on how to operate it porperly.
• I believe the exponential growth of DNA sequening rate (and decreasing of cost) has made genomics research one of the most powerful tools to study biology, and I hope to explore the landscape of bioinformatics and genomics as I carry on the journey of computational biology.

Programming

• Coding is an activity I enjoy, both the puzzle solving (math & engineering) aspect and the joy of building something. Besides, who doesn’t love to have endless arguments over which language/IDE/framework is the best, and wrestle with some obsure and poorly documented tools/software that require act of gods to compile? :)

Example of An Intriging Biology Question

I’d like to leave you with a fasciating piece of unsolved biology before you venture on to poke around the vast world wide web. It was brought up by the famous behavior biologist Dr. Rob Sapolsky in his lecture:

You will have done more good for the health of humanity, than anyone since Jonas Salk inventing the polio vaccine, if you get the answer to this question:
Why is it that when we feel like nobody loves us, we eat Oreo cookies?
Answer this question, and you have just solved half the cases of diabetes in this country.