About Me

I was born in a small town in Putian City, Fujian Province in China and came to study in Singapore when I was about 13 years old. I then completed my GCE O Level and A Level in Singapore and was offered first Permanent Residency and then Citizenship in Singapore. Under the Singapore Enlistment Act 1970, I then served the National Service full time for two years in the Singapore Armed Forces after completing my A levels examinations.

I was then fortunate enough to land on the prestigious A*STAR National Science Scholarships to persue my tertiary education. I went to the University of Cambridge aspiring to become a biologist but became more fascinated with chemistry during my first year thanks to the high quality of teaching by the chemistry department. I decided chemistry would offer me more training in thinking and problem-solving skills and took advantage of the flexibility of the Natural Sciences structure at Cambridge, switching to chemistry (and mathematics in my second year). After obtaining my Bachelor of Arts, I spent one year working full-time on polymer synthesis in Dr. Yugen Zhang's lab at the Institute of Bioengineering and Bioimaging (IBB) in Singapore.

I joined the Theory and Modelling in Chemical Sciences (TMCS) CDT programme at the University of Oxford for my graduate studies. During my first year of TMCS CDT programme, I obtained MSc in Theoretical and Computational Chemistry with Distinction. As part of the first year programme, I have worked under Prof. Adrian Mulholand and Prof. Fredrick Manby on projector-based embedding calculations of citrate synthase enzyme. This eventually culminated in a publication in RSOS journal. For a second project, I worked under Prof. Robert Paton on the computational studies of C-H oxidation of hydrocarbons by metheyl(trifluoromethyl)dioxirane (TFDO) using DFT calculations. On Nov 2019, I successfully defended my Ph.D. thesis. I was a postdoctoral scholar in the Miller Group in Caltech for a year before returning to Singapore and joining the Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC), A*STAR as Scientist I.