My undergraduate degree was in Biological Sciences (Genetics). The 4-year BSc programme was a collaboration between the University of Birmingham and Fudan University. I started doing neurobiology research in my second year, being the only second-year student among third- and fourth-year students selected for the Dream Lab initiative at Fudan University. I spent the last two years of my degree at Birmingham, and conducted my BSc thesis project in the Brain Plasticity & Regeneration Lad, supervised by Professor Alicia Hidalgo.

I then did an MRes in Experimental Neuroscience at Imperial College London, with three 4-month research projects. The first project was based in the UK DRI Care Research & Technology Centre, supervised by Dr Lucia Li. The focus was on functional neuroimaging analysis in Alzheimer’s patients. The second and third projects were based in the Neurogenomics Lab at the UK DRI Imperial Centre, supervised by Dr Sarah Marzi. The focus of these two projects was to develop an R-based algorithm for cell-type deconvolution with epigenomic data (ATAC-seq and ChIP-seq for H3K27ac).

I am now a research technician in the UKDRI Neurogenomics Lab at Imperial, continuing my master’s research on cell-type deconvolution. The aim is to incorporate matrix factorisation into the CHAS R package for ATAC-seq and ChIP-seq deconvolution.