Peter Fu

Reflecting on prospects

l Talented students win Innovation & Technology

Scholarships in an HKFYG award scheme. l It supports internships and attachments with mentorships. l Three awardees explain how the scholarships have helped them. 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 計劃同時提供實習和導師指導支援。

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 Peter Fu

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.

Cancer is exasperating, not only because of the pain it causes but because of its incurable nature – became determined to dedicate myself to cancer research. Understanding cancer takes much painstaking effort even before one can start to think of eradicating it. In a bid to be better prepared, I ventured out of my comfort zone and faced unfamiliar, challenging environments while taking every opportunity I could to exchange of ideas with brilliant researchers in the field.

In the first three months of 2020, I did an internship at the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Science under 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 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 myself in future and am looking for internship opportunities with pharmaceutical companies to learn about the industry, rather different from my familiar academic environment. I would like to help solve real-life problems and hope to polish skills that will make me a better researcher.

The Innovation and Technology Scholarship supported my attachments and internships financially but also gave me the opportunity to meet scholarship awardees from overseas. By exchanging ideas with them, possibilities opened up in new directions.

I am looking for internships with pharmaceutical companies and would like to solve real life problems.

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Peter Fu Wai-kuen is studying Biochemistry and Biology at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology