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My personal journey in science starts from primary school.

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in a, like a scientific class, we would demonstrate,

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using, candle and then covered by, a glass jar

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and then the fire goes off!

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That was amazing. Like like, how could that happen? Like, this is, like, magical.

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And my experience in, plant genomics started when I was undergraduate student and also an intern in a lab. That was the first time I was exposed to plant genomics. And through looking at DNA and with many different individuals of, it was rice at that time, I was actually able to learn about how rice was domesticated and evolved over time.

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So that was like, oh, you don't need to even go to the field. You just learn from the DNA and that records many, many things. And that question keeps pushing me forward. To ask, like, what can we learn more from the DNA of a species?

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I'm an assistant professor from

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Molecular Genetics.

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and my research program is focused on transposable elements, which is a highly repetitive part in almost all eukaryote genomes. And we research about like, what are the functions and what are the consequence in evolution.

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My teaching philosophy derives from the Confucian culture, which is education for all. So I think everyone,

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deserves to have some education, that they have the opportunity to learn things that they're curious about, and also learn things that are helpful for their career.

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And my second philosophy is,

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everyone has their own pace and that they can work on their own and then try to

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outrun themselves and become a better self. So I'm really happy to help during that process to provide the, environment or the training that everybody needs

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to,

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evolve to a next level or a higher level.

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So I hope after they take these courses, they start to appreciate how nature is complex and the beauty of nature, and also how scientific approaches can help us to understand the process of nature and phenomenon in multiple scales, very micro scale and population scale and even species level.

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And I hope they can apply the knowledge that they gain from the class and also the skills learned from the class to the future work and the future career to solve actual problems that they may encounter.

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So I created a program Plant Genomics: Anytime, Anywhere. When I reflect when I participate in undergraduate research back then.

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So that's an undergrad. And I lived in a huge campus.

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And every day I have to commute from a dorm room to the lab. That took me 20 minutes one way and 40 minutes both ways, right? And lots of those times could have been spent on research. I thought to myself, like, can we do better? Right? So plant genomics, because you work on strings of information or lots of information that on a computer that you don't actually need to be at the lab, right?

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You can actually access that information even from a cell phone, from a computer, from a tablet.

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we can ask all different levels of questions depending on the interest of the students and the level they are at.

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So it is just natural for me to create different kinds of independent projects for different students that are interested in plant genomics, so they can do the research not restricted by time and location.

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So this, Plant Genomics: Anytime, Anywhere program mainly focuses on students from, Ohio State and also high school students in the, Columbus City. But potentially it can be also participated by many people from different parts of the world.

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AI is heavily integrated in our study. So basically everyone in my lab is using AI,

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in different ways.

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for beginners. They can use it to learn about the concept and learn about

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the technological side. And for more advanced users, they can use it to decode,

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the problems that they are working on and then help to debug the, the, errors that they're encountering.

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last November, we have a need of developing, a simulation tool that to benchmark that another tool that we are developing.

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back then, there was no tool available for transposable element simulation

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So we came together and discussed with collaborators, and now we use Gen AI to implement what we are thinking

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and what we want to achieve.

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And quickly it became

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a new method. It's already reviewed and turned back,

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in just a year of time.

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So the tool involves

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more than 10,000 lines of code.

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if a regular postdoc needs to develop that many of code, it would have been taking 2 to 3 years.

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That demonstrates the power of AI.

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Where do I see this field in 10, 20 years?

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I think it will be much more automated because of the development of Gen AI.

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lots of the technical

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side of things are no longer challenging and that people can more focus on thinking.

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Right now I am a mentor, but I think everybody become a mentor right now because they have the AI to mentor.

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Basically, they can work with AI or multiple different AI’s and tell them what to do. So I think the limitation in 10, 20 years will be what ideas you have.

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A few years ago, we still say like, yeah, ideas are cheap

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the most important thing is how you implement them. But right now I think ideas are quite expensive because

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with the Gen AI with artificial general intelligence, to do things will be much easier

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but to think about a creative way or creative problem to solve and to answer may become a more valuable,

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skill.