I went to high school at Richmond Secondary School, where I was pondering which courses to take for my International Baccalaureate (IB) diploma. Two brand new courses had drawn my attention. The first, Information Technology in a Global Society, was spearheaded by Mr. Szeto, my Information Technology teacher, and one I helped push in my pre-IB years. I chose the second, Higher Level (HL) Biology, just to be a little bit of maverick, as everyone else would typically take HL Chemistry or HL Physics.
Little did I know the lifelong journey I was about to embark on with this combination.
I started off in Computer Science, but my interest in biology just wouldn't go away.
Eventually, I learned of a combined program in both Microbiology & Immunology and Computer Science. I was able to skip some prerequisite courses in my first year of undergraduate studies due to IB, so I didn't have to run an overloaded schedule to make this combination work.
So hey, why not?
After finishing an Honours thesis in Dr. Steven Hallam's lab inferring metabolic pathways from microbes in water column samples, I ended up with a degree in Combined Honours in Computer Science and Microbiology & Immunology.
The Immunology department at the University of Toronto was, at the time, looking for people with fairly diverse backgrounds. They were also accepting January admissions, and I was applying for an off-cycle start. Also, how could I resist returning to Ontario, where I spent half my childhood?
Little did I know, Toronto was one of the places to be for machine learning at the time.
It was a small, but quickly burgeoning field. My Ph.D. project evolved to focus around using machine learning to stratify children of arthritis – agnostic to existing classifications – using clinical, demographic, and assay data.
Afterwards, I stayed on as a Bioinformatician at The Hospital for Sick Children, helping to spearhead the Understanding Childhood Arthritis Network (UCAN) initiative to identify biomarkers of disease outcome in childhood arthritis.
In the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, a colleague from graduate school reached out about joining the company he was working for. I've been a Senior Data Scientist at BioSymetrics since 2021, helping to develop its phenomics-driven target discovery program.
My journey has transported me from academia into industry, and what a journey it's been so far.
I enjoy recreational badminton and pickleball and games such as League of Legends (and am sometimes known to get slightly too intense in each).
At my church, I also happen to be an extremely rare breed who runs the soundboard, runs the livestream audio, and wields a baby blue bass guitar and/or an acoustic bass guitar on Sunday mornings (obviously, not all at the same time).