Life-Changing Science: The BioBuilder Podcast
Life-Changing Science: The BioBuilder Podcast
Cultivating Curiosity: Greg Wu's Journey in Synthetic Biology
Greg Wu shares his transformative journey from high school in China to becoming an aspiring pioneer in synthetic biology. His story highlights critical educational opportunities at BioBuilder that shaped his passion for science and his future ambitions.
• Greg's initial interest in natural sciences during high school
• Discovering BioBuilder and its influence on his academic career
• Experience in synthetic biology and engineering bacteria for unique projects
• Transitioning to higher education in the US at Emory University
• The value of interdisciplinary studies and collaborations with Georgia Tech
• Future plans for a PhD in biomedical engineering and community engagement
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Hello and welcome to Season 5 of Life-Changing Science, the BioBuilder Podcast. I'm your host, zeeshan, and today I'm thrilled to welcome Greg Wu, a senior at Emory University with an inspiring journey in synthetic biology. Greg's passion for biology began in Zhai Min, china, where he attended high school. His curiosity and drive led him across the globe, from traveling to learning lab for BioBuilder's two-week program to pursuing his undergraduate studies at Emory. Now he's preparing for the next chapter, a PhD in biomedical engineering at Boston University. In this episode we're going to explore the moments that shaped his scientific passion and the role of BioBuilder in his journey. So let's dive right into this episode. I wanted to start off by I know you went to high school in Xiamen in China. I'm curious about when you first got interested in science and biology. Was there like a particular moment or experience that sort of sparked that curiosity while you were in high school?
Speaker 2:school. Yeah. So, uh, when I was in high school, um, I've been always pretty much interested in natural science in general. In my high school weeks I was able to like take classes in like chemistry and biology. Uh, I honestly wasn't that good at biology back in high school, but I was really interested in chemistry and I was fascinated by the lab courses. You know, just like seeing experiments and doing experiments myself. Seeing like you know how color change, how you know that's understanding the structure of different chemicals, that's something really cool to me.
Speaker 2:How I kind of switched to biology is actually pretty interesting. So I happened to learn about bio-builder when I was a sophomore at high school and that was actually the first time I heard about the word synthetic biology and I was pretty interested in it. So, you know, I looked a little deeper into you know what synthetic biology is about and it looks like a really interdisciplinary field. And I know like, if I participate in the program with Bob, I'll be able to, you know, get some firsthand lab experience, which is something really interesting, because back in my high school we actually don't have that much of like a rigorous or like comprehensive curriculum for like experiments. It's more like a test or like exam focused. So you know, I was really interested to learn that, so I joined bible builder in 2019 summer and we were able to do a lot of really cool stuff, like how did you hear about bible, did there?
Speaker 1:I mean, uh, was there sort of like bible? The clubs around china as well?
Speaker 2:um, yeah, thanks for my counselor oh okay, awesome.
Speaker 1:And what made you like did? Were you looking for some extra programs? That, hey, I want to learn a bit more. You know experiments. I want something that's interdisciplinary, I like science. And did you go to the counselor and they brought it up that by? Hey, there's this thing called BioBuilder.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, yeah. So they recommended Bio a bubble there to me how did you partake in bio? Builder itself was yeah I participated in the learning lab in cambridge, massachusetts, and I remember the program was like two weeks so we were able to do some really cool stuff about synthetic biology. Um, in Lab Central we learned something about plasmids, about bacteria culture. I remember we had the iGen team from MIT to give us a little talk about what they've been working on for their competition. That's something really cool.
Speaker 1:Some of the experiments you learned, some of the questions you were asking. Let's dive deeper into those two weeks at LabCentral.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah. So one project that I still remember is that we were trying to make E coli smell like a banana.
Speaker 2:Yeah, just your everyday standard thing's something really cool because, like I've actually never done any experiment with like bacteria um and you know, naturally the spill they smell pretty bad, uh, but the um we were able to like use some techniques like molecular cloning, we were able to like engineer the plasmid and then we did like bacterial culture and then the next day it actually smelled like bananas. So that was something really cool and we learned about you're actually able to use skills in synthetic biology to engineer or like reprogram the bacteria so it could produce maybe ingredients you could use for like making perfume or other products for like commercial use. So that that's the. That's my first impression with biobuilder and with synthetic biology and it's really about you're able to use these like engineering, bioengineering skills, skills like to uh reprogram the bacteria and to make um so they can make something that is really beneficial that's super cool, and had you done any of these experiments, uh, before, or like was a lot of this new?
Speaker 2:uh, a lot of those were new, so I never held a pipe pipe gun before, I never used a sterile to actually pick a colony before, um, and yeah, I definitely never done a bacterial liquid culture, so that was something really cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I can imagine. And you said this was the first time you were working with bacteria, you know, in the lab and doing a lot of genetic engineering. Did these, you know, two weeks at BiBilder, sort of challenge the way or change the way you think about what it means to design life?
Speaker 2:That's a really good question. So back then the concept of plasmid is definitely something really new to me and I remember looking at this plasmid sequence map and I just had no idea what it is. Plasmid sequence map and I just had no idea what it is. I would look at different sequences and different proteins that those genes code for, but I guess I didn't really have like a solid understanding of like its functions and its application. But it really all came back to me later on as I started my undergrad here at Emory and by working under the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Emory and Georgia Tech, my project happened to be focused in synthetic biology. Again, those skill sets and those concepts they all came back to me later on. I'm actually really surprised to see how these little dots are all connected.
Speaker 1:That's really really cool to hear. So, okay, I definitely want to ask you more about you know some of the projects genetic engineering projects that you did in undergrad. But let's come back to okay you've done. You know you're an amazing sort of two-week very immersive app-heavy with BioBuilder. So you know once that's once that was complete. You know you finished up your high school in China and what made you want to do undergrad in the US.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So back then I was really new to the concept of liberal arts education, the concept of liberal arts education, and at Emory we focus on this perfect combination of research and liberal arts. And I also learned that in colleges in the US you have a lot of flexibility, a lot of freedom to explore whatever discipline you're interested in. And here at Emory we also have this collaboration with Georgia Tech for the Department of Biomedical Engineering. So you kind of get the perfect balance of both worlds, both medicine and engineering, and I was really attracted by that. So I thought coming to the US US to complete my undergrad would be a really good choice.
Speaker 1:I agree that that makes a lot of sense, and so you'd mentioned that a lot of the you know initial skills in synthetic biology that you learned, you know, back during high school while doing BioBuilder that sort of helped you with your undergrad project at Emory. So let's dive into that project. So you know, you're at Emory, you're getting a very interdisciplinary education, um, and you said you were also interested in chemistry. So I was curious as to one, what sort of made you decide to choose biological engineering as your undergrad? And two, let's talk about some of the projects that you did in the lab.
Speaker 2:So my undergrad major at Emory is biology, so it's not, you know, bioengineering or biomedical engineering. It doesn't, in fact it doesn't involve much of like a quantitative, like engineering training. So my first lab at Emory is in the School of Medicine. It's a pediatric oncology lab and we were working on breast cancer and during that process, which was my first two years at Emory, I did a lot of like wet lab experiments and I was able to, you know, attend a lot of seminars and talk to my PI, the grad students in the lab, and at one moment I thought to myself that all these really complex like biological questions that we are trying to answer and can we take like a more interdisciplinary approach to solve it. And my PI back then he has a strong collaboration with his colleagues at Georgia Tech who happen to be under the biomedical engineering or chemical engineering department, and I was able to witness how they you know both collaboration to solve really complex problems such as like breast cancer, like leukemia, and I thought, well, maybe I could gain some training in like biomedical engineering.
Speaker 2:And later on the summer, after my sophomore year, I joined a tissue engineering lab at Georgia Tech to gain some training in biomedical engineering and it was an internship. It was very rigorous and I was just fascinated by how broad the field of biomedical engineering is and how it's able to combine so many disciplines. It's not only biology or medicine, but also, like computer science and chemical engineering and physics to solve these, the issues that we're currently having right now. So later on, starting my junior year, I joined an epigenetic engineering lab under the BME department here and that's where I'm still continuing my current research, and the lab focuses on synthetic biology and we use approaches in synthetic biology and bioinformatics to solve problems in like cancer and to better understand the epigenetics of like diseases I'm doing epigenetics research right now, um, in my current role as a bioinformatician, so that's really cool.
Speaker 1:So you, it seems like you've had a lot of great sort of different internships and research opportunities. So the the two experience, the few-week experience that you had at BioBuilder back in high school, if we come back to that, if we look back to where you are now, how did that experience sort of help open doors for certain internships and all the research experiences that you?
Speaker 2:had. I learned about synthetic biology when I was working on my project during the bio builder program and although I first came to Emory as a biology major and I did not think about doing research in synthetic biology or just bioengineering at all, later on I start to reflect on what I really want to do with my career in terms of research and science and I would always think about what those two weeks program was at Ballwilder and I thought about synthetic biology is perhaps the direction I want to go into and it actually is, and that really helped me make my decision to commit to epigenetic engineering and synthetic biology lab as an aquaplasm here at Emory and it also helped me figure out what I like, the direction I want to focus on as a biomedical engineering PhD.
Speaker 1:Firstly, congratulations on the PhD getting admitted into the PhD at Boston University, such, you know, such an exciting chapter. And what, what excites you most about sort of this next chapter? Because you know PhD is, you know, of course, a a very long commitment, but it's also so exciting in terms of you mentioning to disciplinary a lot, um. So this is such a great opportunity for you to sort of combine biology, maths, engineering, etc. Are you looking forward to like continuing in sort of epigenetics research and engineering, or are you maybe looking to explore a few more different areas within biomedical engineering, of course?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So I think the bigger direction I will go into is definitely still synthetic biology. I've been doing mostly epigenetic engineering for my undergrad, so that is definitely one direction I'm interested in continuing as a PhD, and you can definitely use synthetic biology approaches to solve really challenging problems in epigenetic engineering.
Speaker 1:For example, you could build different circuits to create cancer therapeutics and that could be something really cool you, you know you've also mentioned that you're sort of excited to, you know, get back to the community. What do you think that looks like for you? And like, how do you hope to sort of you know, inspire the next generation of synthetic biologists?
Speaker 2:yeah, yeah. So I think something Bioboater has been doing that's really cool is that the organization is always trying to make STEM education, or biotech, or synthetic biology education, more accessible to students, whether it's in middle school, high school or undergrads, and I think that is something fascinating, whether it's in middle school, high school or like undergrads, and I think that is something fascinating and it's actually part of my career. Goal is to make biotech or just, you know, life science education more accessible to everyone, to everyone. And you know something I could think of about, you know, giving back to the community is perhaps, after I graduate from my PhD program, I could, you know, join Bob Older and I could design some really cool like bioengineering curriculum for our next generation scientists.
Speaker 1:Thanks again to Greg for joining me today.
Speaker 1:What I found most insightful in this episode was Greg's journey of self-discovery. He started with an interest in chemistry, moved into bio and then found his passion at the intersection of engineering and medicine. He understood his strengths like early on and sought an interdisciplinary education which led him to the US for its flexible liberal arts system. His path to biomedical engineering and symbio shows the power of following curiosity and really embracing a cross-disciplinary approach to science. I think this episode will be really useful to high school and college students exploring careers in biology and engineering and symb bio, especially those unsure how to combine multiple interests. And if you'd like to learn more about anything Greg and I discussed today, please refer to the show notes. Join me for the next BioBuilder podcast. We'll welcome another wonderful guest whose career has been influenced by BioBuilder's life changing science. See you next time.