TURNING POINT Winnie Tang

摘要

Epigeneticist Winnie Tang was one of ten US-based women to attend the fifth annual US-China Young Scientists Forum, sponsored by the US Department of State, in April. The Chinese native, who is a researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, explains why such events are so important for international scientists. What were your early-career ambitions? As an undergraduate at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, I didn't think about my career very much. I just wanted to do a PhD in Hong Kong, research multidrug-resistant and radiation-resistant forms of liver cancer and maybe one day become a teacher. When I started my PhD, my adviser had just moved back to Hong Kong from a stint at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and encouraged his students to go to international meetings to network and to look for research opportunities. And, in fact, I met my future postdoctoral adviser - cell biologist and physiologist Shuk-mei Ho, then at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester - at a meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research.