So welcome to our advanced neurobiological class. So, it's a great honor to have you. >> Thank you. >> So, for this opportunity, we would like to have some conversation regarding how you get into neuroscience, or by this purpose, how you get into science? As I recall, you initially study for clinical medicine, so how can you get into the activity for basic research? >> Yeah, this happened when I was a medical student in Dongji Medical University back in Wuhan. I was in this special program, seven year program, which actually gave us opportunities to do research. So I stayed in the lab for six months and did electrophysiological recordings on cardiomyocytes and studied the calcium channels there using past findings. I became very excited about research and found that the nature of research, the nature of making new discoveries by doing lab research is very attractive to me. So after that experience, I pretty much made up my mind that I want to pursue a career in research. >> So basically, research where you were training for medical sciences get you hooked? >> Absolutely, absolutely. So it all goes back to that opportunity and the design of the program, which gives the medical students an opportunity to do some hands-on research. And I think, looking back, the conditions of the lab or the resources that we've had back then is incredibly limited. I would say that the level of the researches are quite low. Nevertheless, it's really stimulating. It showed me what scientific research is all about, and that was enough to convince me that this is the career path that I would like to take. >> Great, so then, for grad school, you went to Duke University and studied with Dr. Topesenmayer where you did very interesting and fundamental research you did in recordation of [INAUDIBLE] and its translocation into spines. But later after that, I saw it's interesting that you moved from the more limited neuroscience research and joined a lab in UCSF, specifically Dr. Corey Buckman's lab. You see one, the invertebrate limitor as a model system. This is interesting because as I know, most of the people mind switching from the more primitive or invertebrate system into more complex advanced invertebrate system that are thought to be more similar to humans. But you have a medical science background, but choosing sort of a different way, what are your source? >> Yeah, that's a really interesting question. Actually looking back, it is really because of the guidance that I received while I was a student at Duke. So, when we do lab research, we go to the lab, we collect data, and we try to understand a phenomenon. So I vividly remember once the students in my department, the cell biology department, had a meeting with the chair at the time who was Mike Cheets. So Mike Cheets discovered dining, and he's a very well respected scientist. So he's quite senior. I remember the students asking many questions, and a lot of the questions seemed to have centered around the question of what is really research? And I vividly remember to this day what Mike said, and it stuck with me forever. He said, research is about making sense of something. Making some sense, and I thought that's really the reason. So, I find that the reason that I do research is not, and I'm sorry to say that it's not to cure a disease and it's not really to publish a paper or not to really get a grant. All these things are necessary, but what drives me is making sense. It's to understand things that I don't understand before. Okay, so because of that, I think what really drove me to see elegance is essentially the reason is that I felt that you could do more experiments. You could do really logic experiments, and the system is much simpler compared to the verte vermilion vertebrate systems. You can do somewhat cleaner experiment there. So this was really the reason that I decided to go to see elegance. However, I didn't completely switch, right? I stayed with synaptic biology and a molecular developmental neuroscience. And I felt like I have accumulated a certain amount of knowledge. And I've contributed a little bit to the field. And so I wanted to carry that momentum to the next phase. And so also, I have to give a shout out to Geogram He, my good friend who actually made the first suggestion for me to check out Corey Buckman's lab. And so I visited her lab, and it was also somewhat of a random decision because I didn't know very many warm labs at the time. But her lab was just the most exciting place at the time, and I was completely impressed by herself and her students at the time. So I thought the environment was fantastic, so that also helped me to make that choice.
