Who are we?
That’s us! Scholars and Alumnus!
For more on each one:
An-Chun (Jenny) Chien grew up in Taipei, Taiwan. Her family moved to Christchurch, New Zealand when she was 15. She then went to college in Singapore. Despite the language transition from Mandarin to English, and the cultural difference in foreign countries, she has always been intrigued and inspired by the simple beauty of life. She decided to major in Biochemistry at National University of Singapore. During her college years, she developed a passion for the sense of adventure in research so she pursued a PhD in Molecular Cell Biology at Washington University in St. Louis.
Jenny’s thesis project focuses on understanding the molecular mechanism underlying bacterial cell size control. Bacterial cells increase their size in a nutrient-dependent manner. That is, when they are cultured in nutrient-rich medium, they can be up to twice the size of their counterparts growing in nutrient-poor medium. This is their smart way of making sure that they have enough space to accommodate increasing genetic materials when they are cultured under nutrient-rich conditions. Her lab has identified the pathway and the effector protein in this process. Jenny’s work has demonstrated how this protein senses changes in nutrient availability and then transmits this information to the division machinery, giving rise to a smoothly graded cell size response observed in bacteria. This finding would shed light on cell size control in general, a fundamental and critical aspect of cell biology.
Jenny chose this project because she was amazed by the intricate beauty of life in its simplest form. She thinks that it is as important to start from the basics and to understand how life works in the simplest form as finding cures for cancer or AIDS. In this sense, research has been a truly humbling experience for her.
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Jiazi Guo (Jasmine) is from China and she has a bachelor degree of finance. After three years working with the biggest commercial bank in China, she realized that finance is not her passion but marketing and management are. That was why she chose to pursue a MBA degree to study more about business and marketing. She just finished a 12-week internship with Solae, LLC, a St. Louis based food ingredient and nutrition company.
In the fall semester, she will continue her part-time internship with the company and she will also working on her MBA degree to finish the final year. Luckily (or unluckily), MBA degree does not demand a dissertation so the goal of the final year for her will be to have a deeper understanding about marketing as well as finalizing her next 5-year career path in the area.
The reason she chose marketing was really complicated. It was a final decision of all her former experience and it actually came from a “strong feeling”. Marketing is an area where you have to put everything you know about the business of the company together and make some really important decision. The feeling of knowing and deciding makes her feel really interesting and serious.
Jasmine really wants to contribute to the society of McDonnell Academy. She had some experience to link science with business before. She believes that it is really important to understand how science and business can work together at the right time in a right way. She is always willing to provide business perspective to the society.
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Duanxiang (Steve) Xu comes from Shanghai, China. His English name is after his favorite Snooker player Steve Davis. Prior to coming to Wash-U, Steve received a Ph.D. in chemistry and worked for a bio-analytical instrument company in multiple technical and business functions. He once had a 5-week long back-to-back trip to Canada and Europe to provide technical support to customers as well as to conduct road shows and presentations to open new markets.
In fulfilling his mission to be a business leader in the technical sector, Steve chose to pursue an MBA at Olin Business School and join the McDonnell Academy. His concentration in business is strategy and management. Steve did his internship at Sigma Aldrich Corporation this summer in the Strategy and Corporate Development Department. Combining technical background and trainings received at business school, Steve did competitive intelligence research for the company and participated in corporate development activities such as merger and acquisition. Steve expect to be involved in the strategic planning process, get immersed in various business functions and eventually rise in the corporation to take more leadership responsibilities on transforming technology into successful business.
Upon his successful completion of summer internship, Steve will continue to work part time at Sigma Aldrich Corporation during the second school year as an analyst in strategic planning. Sigma Aldrich also becomes the academy sponsor and will support Steve as the Corporate Fellow.
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Jing Xu, a Ph.D. candidate in cultural anthropology, comes from China. She studied sociology before coming to St. Louis. She was also involved in several research projects on children’s health, HIV/AIDS prevention & care, cultural/ethnic tourism, etc. Eventually, she came to the field of child cognition, found it 
most enigmatic and exciting, because research in this area would help her understand what human nature is, and how culture is part of human nature.
The anthropology department at Wash-U is a wonderful community to be part of, because of its friendly, open, and intellectually inspiring atmosphere. Jing is most thankful for the opportunities in engaging with cross-disciplinary discussion. She enjoys learning to think like an anthropologist with the heart of empathy and eyes open to the complexities of human life, but she is also keen to learn not to confine herself within disciplinary boundaries. In studying child’s mind, she is trying to use both anthropological and psychological methods in a mutually constructive way.
Jing just finished her third year and will start doing fieldwork in Shanghai, China, for around a year. Jing will study Chinese preschool children’s social-moral development in general, and in particular, she will focus on how they develop interpersonal trust. China is a perfect place to study this topic, because during the rapid social and economic change, everybody feels and talks about the “crisis of trust”; also, children’s social-moral development under the one-child policy is always a highly concerned issue in Chinese society.
Felix, her son, now one-and-a-half year old, has been a source of inspiration for Jing in thinking about child development. During the year of fieldwork, Jing will be staying with her family, and she will include Felix–who will be enrolled in the same preschool Jing is studying–into her research sample for daily observation.
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Juanyi Yu comes from China. She got her Bachelor of Engineering with honors in Information Engineering from Th
e Chinese University of Hong Kong, focusing on communication theories. She decided to come to US for graduate school after finishing the summer school in UC Berkeley as a sophomore.
She came to WUSTL in 2006 as a graduate student in the department of Electrical and Systems Engineering and one of the first cohorts of McDonnell scholars. She discovered and developed her interests in control systems and optimization during the first two years of coursework. She has worked as a research assistant in applied mathematics lab in the past three years, focusing on implementing control theory and optimization algorithms to model and control complex biological systems.
Her work provides a promising direction in inheritance diseases and cancer treatment by ensure the high-fidelity of DNA molecules. Currently, she has already finished her dissertation and defense.
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Chuanmei Zhu grew up in a small village in Hunan province, China. Her parents and most of her relatives are farmers who did almost all the farm work by hand. Witnessing how hybrid rice and pest-resistant cotton developed by plant molecular biologists had greatly improved the lives of farmers, she was inspired to become such scientist herself.
She studied in Tsinghua University 2004-2008 majoring in Biology and Biotechnology. There she did research in Dr. Dong Liu’s lab to study how plants respond to phosphate deficiency, an important problem in agriculture. This experience taught her that basic research is an essential step towards improving plants to benefit society.
She is now a Ph.D. candidate in the plant biology program at Washington University. This school is the most attractive to her among others because of its strengths in both basic and applied plant sciences. Following three successful rotations, she decided to join Dr. Ram Dixit lab to study the fascinating question of cell wall assembly. Cell walls impact every aspect of plant life and have a huge potential as a renewable and clean fuel source. The opportunity to make an impact on this field was irresistible to her. Her thesis research exploits single molecule imaging technology and the power of genetics in the model plant Arabidopsis to unravel the mystery of how patterned cellulose deposition is achieved in plants― a process that is central to cell wall assembly and plant cell morphogenesis.
Her long-term career plan is to become a leader in the field of plant molecular and cellular biology and to use the knowledge obtained from basic research to address global challenges related to food and energy security.
