Profile

I was born in Beijing, China and lived there till I got my bachelor’s degree in chemistry, where I really got interested in how protein molecules function to make all living organisms alive. After getting my PhD degree in the US I moved to Cambridge 3 years ago, working at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology. Anime, football and mysteries are my source of inspirations, apart from science. 🙂

Tardigrades are a kind of small tiny organisms living in water. They have attracted lots of scientists for their ability to survive extreme conditions, including extreme dryness, radiations, freezing or boiling temperatures and etc. In fact, they had been accidentally sent onto the moon last year! (see this news: https://www.livescience.com/moon-tardigrades-future.html)

I want to try my best to understand what makes the tardigrades “invincible” to these stresses and if we could take advantage of the key molecules which are involved in this resistance. Previous researches suggested that some families of proteins which do not adopt a defined structure, like an enzyme, might play an important role in their survival. So I’m now making this proteins and combining multiple methods, including cell imaging and multiple biophysical methods, as well as computational analysis, to understand how these proteins protect these amazing organisms.