Perspectives March 2021∣Youth Hong Kong
Reflecting on prospects l Talented students win Innovation & Technology Scholarships in an HKFYG award scheme.
l 創新科技獎學金旨在嘉許別具創科才能的學生，提供 學習機會及回饋平台。
l It supports internships and attachments with mentorships.
l 計劃同時提供實習和導師指導支援。
l Three awardees explain how the scholarships have helped them.
l 三位得獎青年分享這個獎學金如何協助他們發展所 長。
Shadowing frontier researchers All through my undergraduate years at HKUST, I have been a diehard tracker of cancer biology. This passion stems from a very personal experience. I witnessed a family member suffering from pharyngeal cancer a couple of years ago. He was my grandfather and his cancer was terminal. This diagnosis was a hard blow to my family. With an obstructed throat, he struggled to move, speak or even swallow and was bedbound in his last days.
Peter Fu
at Professor Alan Wong’s lab in the HKU Department of Medicine in summer 2019. It was an honour to talk to Professor Leung. We discussed the obligations of researchers as well as Hong Kong. He never lacked for inspiring questions to put to me, making me reflect on my prospects and direction in life. The HKU lab experience also allowed me to shadow frontier researchers in synthetic biology projects, a fast-emerging field unfamiliar to me.
I hope to be a researcher Cancer is exasperating, not myself in future only because of the pain I am looking for internships with and am looking for it causes but because of its internship opportunities incurable nature – became pharmaceutical companies and would with pharmaceutical determined to dedicate like to solve real life problems. companies to learn myself to cancer research. about the industry, rather Understanding cancer takes different from my familiar academic environment. I much painstaking effort even before one can start to think would like to help solve real-life problems and hope to of eradicating it. In a bid to be better prepared, I ventured polish skills that will make me a better researcher. out of my comfort zone and faced unfamiliar, challenging environments while taking every opportunity I could to The Innovation and Technology Scholarship supported exchange of ideas with brilliant researchers in the field. my attachments and internships financially but also gave me the opportunity to meet scholarship In the first three months of 2020, I did an internship at awardees from overseas. By exchanging ideas with the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Science under them, possibilities opened up in new directions. the supervision of Professor Hisao Masai. It was a thoughtprovoking experience, working on replication patterns, a relatively little-explored field where there is speculation about the connection with human genome integrity. In Hong Kong, I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to be a mentee of Professor Gabriel Leung, Dean of Medicine at the HKU Faculty of Medicine. I also interned 26
Peter Fu Wai-kuen is studying Biochemistry and Biology at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
