About meI was born and raised in an academically-supportive middle-class family in east China, which I attribute to most of the educational opportunities I have experienced. My curiosity and creativity is fueled by exploring the nature and manifested through scientific and artistic endeavors.
In 2014, I received my Bachelor of Science in Biology from Fudan University, where I am an alumna of the National Top Talent Program. Upon graduation, I enrolled in the doctoral training program at the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology (OEB) at Harvard University, which I completed in 2020. At OEB, I have been a student curator assistant of Harvard University Herbaria and a Science Education Partner of Harvard Museums of Science and Culture. I am currently a Stengl-Wyer Postdoc fellow at UT Austin, where I am a researcher, teacher, and mentor. |
Undergraduate Mentee
Saneeva George TEJAS 2022
Saneeva is on the Biology Honors track at UT Austin. She currently works on a herbarium specimen based research project to characterize the evolution of leaf architecture in parasitic broomrapes (Orobanchaceae). Combining traditional taxonomic techniques such as leaf clearing and quantitative approaches including geometric morphometrics and machine learning, this project aims to provide the first comprehensive assessment of vegetative degradation in parasitic plants under a comparative framework. |
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Jenni Kao UC Riverside, 2020-2021
Jenni explores a number of bioinformatic projects from insect gut microbiomes to venom protein evolution at UC. Jenni trained herself to code in R and used bioinformatic pipelines such as QIIME to analyze DNA sequences data to characterize the microbiome of the grape phylloxera as well as the evolution of the venom proteins they secreted while feeding on grapes. These results provide insights into the mechanism of plant-insect interaction for this important insect pest in the vineyards. |