I am a current Master's in Biomedicine Student at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden doing my Msc Thesis at Brigham and Women's Hospital within Harvard Medical School. I will start my PhD in August within the joint ATLAS Programme from BioNTech and TRON researching translational oncology with a focus on the role of neurons in pancreatic cancer. I believe the experience of joining the Forum will be hugely influential in my still young scientific career and allow me to interact directly with field leaders and other young professionals that will contribute to my network for years to come. The programme for this year seems highly enticing and have heard accounts of the previous years that inspired me to apply as well. I believe I can also contribute positively to the Forum bringing outside experience and perspectives to beautiful Hong Kong while also experiencing the city and culture first hand. As such, I believe the decision to allow my to join the Forum would be a mutually beneficial one and drive forward the innovative and diverse talent network that Hong Kong is building through its scientific initiative. Thank you in advance for taking time to read my application and your consideration.

For my Master's Thesis we are researching the use of intratumoral microdevices for the personalised cancer treatment. I am designing a novel microdevice that allows better access to tumours located deep inside the body and will allow both the release of microscopic amounts of chemotherapeutic agents and biopsy collection of those drug treated regions to get drug response readouts in situ. As part of this project I am also analysing the prostate cancer clinical trial data where I am holistically analysing readouts from immunohistochemistry, haemotoxyling and eosin staining, cyclical immunofluoroscence, and spatial transcriptomics. This allows us to get the full picture of what drug works best for which patient, and why, and will allow us to make recommendations to physicians with high confidence deriving from this analysis. For my PhD, I will be focusing on the role of neurons in pancreatic cancer and classifying the factors at play for eventual biomarker development. To do so, we will use immuno- and neuro-competent 3D pancreatic cancer models altering the interaction between immune, neural, and tumour cells through specific inhibitors and harnessing the responses for therapeutic potential with the ultimate goal of a more effective pancreatic cancer biomarker targeting this interaction.