How I got here
The path that brought health, data, and technology together for me.
Earlier: China to the United States
I grew up in China and went to an international-track school. Studying abroad was not a fixed path from the start. I researched different options myself, talked them through with an overseas-education counselor, and eventually chose to attend high school in North Carolina.
The climate was actually part of that decision — North Carolina felt closer to Wuhan than some of the other places I considered. The first few years were mostly about improving my English, adjusting to a different school culture, and figuring things out as I went. There was no single turning point.
SUNY Morrisville to the University of Florida
At SUNY Morrisville, I still did not have a clear sense of what I wanted to study. Over time, learning started to feel rewarding again, helped in large part by supportive professors and the people around me.
I eventually became interested in Information Systems at the University of Florida — a combination of business and technical work that fit the things I was becoming curious about — and worked through the prerequisites to transfer.
One course at UF stayed with me: QMB 3250, Statistics for Business Decisions. I could follow the concepts in class but often got stuck when I had to apply them step by step. Once I discovered office hours, I started going regularly, bringing my reasoning and mistakes with me. That course made something simple very clear to me: understanding a concept and knowing how to apply it are different skills.
Tsinghua: skills became tools
I was already interested in global health, but I was still trying to understand where my technical background fit into it.
During public-health research work at Tsinghua, I worked with data and literature alongside researchers using programming, statistics, and visualization to study real public-health problems. It was the first time I saw skills I had learned in Information Systems being used in a very different context.
That changed how I thought about technical skills. Programming and data analysis were not a destination by themselves; they were tools I could bring into different problem areas. Global health increasingly felt like a place where I wanted to use them.
Duke and Georgia Tech: today
I wanted to keep working in global health, but I also did not want to stop building my technical skills. I started the master's in Global Health at Duke and, alongside it, Georgia Tech's online master's in Computer Science.
Since then, the two sides have started to come together more naturally in my research and projects. Health and technology stopped feeling like competing paths. Global health is the problem space I care about, while data, information systems, and computer science give me different ways to work on it.