My time is split between falling down internet rabbit holes, exploring new ideas/places, studying topics of interest, and going on spontaneous adventures. During the day, I'm an engineering undergrad at the University of Toronto.
I strongly believe the intersection of otherwise divergent fields brings the most intriguing insights with a unique potential to become paradigm-shifting ideas. This is why I am interested in crossovers of other disciplines in biology.
Beyond science, I also care deeply about healthcare and education accessibility, as well as how we can improve incentive structures for better health outcomes.
As someone with lots of divergent interests, I like to think my past experiences are equally diverse. Still learning though! 🌱
show current/past experiences
Now
In heads-down learning mode, studying things I'm interested in and things I don't find the most interesting, but could be useful down the road.
Previous [1]
Loyal (CompBio Associate): aging biology with dogs as a translational model; computational biology team (everything from data visualization projects to writing code snippets for streamlining workflows).
Wrana Lab (Research Student): microfluidic chips for studying organoid systems; designing a micromixer device to improve cell seeding (involves running computatonal fluid dynamics simulations, which is pretty cool!) and touching cells.
Bank of Canada’s Quantum Lab (Research Assistant): coauthored staff analytical paper on quantum machine learning applications in finance. Completed literature review and benchmarked quantum algorithms/software. Presented several times to the Advisor to the Governor on Digitalization.
Harvard Energy Computational Science (Research Mentee, Quantum Chemistry): investigated quantum natural gradients for variational quantum eigensolvers, applied to small-molecule calculations. Code on GitHub and tutorial in Xanadu’s research blog.
Gamechanger.co (Associate, Growth & Marketing): all things growth, community-scaling, and content marketing; venture capital and innovation advisory firm. Helped with design/marketing on the Disco team as well, an edtech startup founded with inspiration from Gamechanger Sessions.
Quantum Open Source Foundation (Core Team, Community): helping scale the amazing quantum open-source software community and the quantum mentorship program.
Creative Destruction Lab (Apprentice): shadowed some of Toronto's top VCs and deep tech founders in CDL sessions (engineering and AI streams).
Goddard Gamage LLP (Legal Research Intern): assisted with basic legal research relating to estate litigation, and prepared wills and documentation for estate litigation (I did once upon a time, want to be a lawyer).
++ Branding/design freelance, consulting (for Zappos, KidogoCo, Sidewalk Labs), summer volunteer in hospitals, camp counsellor at summer camps.
[1] I think it’s important to note this list isn’t exhaustive. It doesn’t fully capture the non-linearity of my journey or past failures. I wish someone had told me this earlier, so I’m leaving it as a footnote - everyone starts somewhere and can take (many) detours, it’s just not always fully documented on their profiles.
Say hi at hello at lzylili dot com or on Twitter! I'm also on GitHub and LinkedIn.