Dennis is an undergraduate student studying physics and mathematical/computational biology at Harvey Mudd College. He is passionate about systems and synthetic biology, with applications in the field of immunology. He also loves physics because he is fascinated with measurements and uncertainties – how we may have biases observing a system on a micro-level. Previously, he worked on the 2017 MIT iGEM team on controlling alternative splicing with CRISPR-dCas13a, and then in the lab of Jacques Banchereau at the Jackson Laboratory (JAX) on using Long Reads to detect novel isoforms that may have caused different immune responses. In the Shalek Lab, he is grateful for this opportunity and looks forward to take a further step in using single-cell genomics to study tissue-level immune landscapes. He is excited to eventually apply those methods and discoveries for eventually engineering immune cells with synthetic biology principles.

Dennis is originally from Shanghai, China, and then came to U.S. for high school in Connecticut. Outside the lab and school, he is a gym rat who also loves eating unhealthy, sweet, high-calorie foods. He eats salad, but that mostly just provides him excuses to get buffalo wings and chicken tenders. He is very proud of his ability to find napping time in the middle of the day because he needs to sleep quite a lot. A major goal that he has not achieved is to have a funny husky to be as quirky as he is.