This is my very first Jekyll post and social media post in a long time. The reason for this post and my renewed interest in gathering my thoughts stems mostly from the volatility I’ve experienced in 2020. As I’ve gotten older, I frequently wish that I could catalog more of my thoughts. A friend once told me, “Mike, if you had a twitter and posted a random scientific fact every day, I would follow you”. I do in fact have a twitter handle but I have never posted with it, nor followed anyone. I created the handle only so I could use the tweepy python API to follow DJT’s tweets, perform some NLP and sentiment analysis, then trade stocks based on whatever hysteria he was hyping up. But I digress…

Perhaps I should take a step back and introduce myself and my lovely family. My name is Mike Zhong, I am a 30-something year old Chinese American living in the greater Boston area of MA. My wife, Beverlie is a lovely woman but I’ll keep her details sparse to honor her privacy. We have a 2-year old daughter, Dara, who has quickly become to center of my life. I currently work as a Bioinformatics Scientist at Gritstone Oncology. We are a clinical-stage biotech company developing cancer therapeutics. I won’t dive into the details as this could merit several individual posts, if you’re interested, you can visit Gritstone Oncology to learn more.

I studied Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, and Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and hold degrees in these subjects. These subjects also happen to be a passion of mine and combined with my work, keep me busy and constantly in pursuit of knowledge.

In my limited free time, I enjoy playing videos (PCMR), board games, basketball, watching TV, but mostly, I enjoy spending time with my daughter. She is objectively the cutest baby in the world and probably could have been the next gerber baby.

dara

I intend to use this space mostly to ramble and stream various trains of thoughts. Due to the broad and eclectic nature of the topics, I will not even attempt to enumerate them but I will try to tag them appropriately so as to have some semblance of structure.