It was 11 p.m. when my phone suddenly rang as I finished a late imaging session. It was a call from my mother. Given the time difference between China and the U.S., she rarely called at that hour of the day. But I didn’t think too much and picked up my phone. On the other end, she told me my father had been diagnosed with liver cancer and was currently in hospital. “The tumor sits too close to the artery,” she said. “The surgeons cannot remove it. I don’t know what to do!” In that moment, the steady rhythm of my daily life — conducting experiments, charting my Ph.D. timeline and planning for the future — fell apart. I didn’t know how to help my family from thousands of miles away, and I realized, for the first time, just how uncertain life is.
Despite everything, I called my dad every day, and sometimes sought second opinions from medical oncologists at the cancer hospital where I was pursuing my Ph.D., especially when we were unsure about his treatment options. Fortunately, the immunotherapy shrank the tumor enough for doctors to surgically remove it, and he is doing well now. But the moment stayed with me: Life’s unpredictability is inevitable, and I must learn how to adapt and excel within it.
Just as I learned to confront uncertainty after hearing my father’s liver cancer diagnosis, my Ph.D. experience was also a journey of moving from resisting unpredictability to learning how to flow with it. I still recall the moment when, after months of preparations, the results of my key experiments turned out to be inconsistent with our hypothesis. I was in disbelief at first: Initially, I denied what the data revealed and chose to repeat the experiments again and again, hoping for a different result that matched our expectations. But this wishful thinking never came true. When I finally accepted the reality, I felt embarrassed to present my data to my supervisor; it felt like admitting the entire project was a failure. But I went ahead and presented my “results” in the lab meeting.
To my surprise, my mentor was thrilled about the data. Although this result largely contradicted my original hypothesis, it pointed toward a new direction that could reveal deeper biological insights. “Sometimes you have to resist the temptations in your head, and follow where the data lead you,” my mentor told me after the meeting. Afterward, we revised our hypothesis based on this unexpected result and redirected the project, which led to presentations at international conferences and publications.
Before departing for my postdoc at Johns Hopkins after finishing my Ph.D., I turned to my mentor for advice on how to thrive in the next chapter of my scientific journey. “Doing successful science is like learning to swim after being suddenly thrown into the water. You have to trust yourself, and learn to move through the discomfort of uncertainties,” he told me after a long pause.
Carrying this lesson forward in my current role as a postdoctoral fellow at Hopkins, I now bridge my past training in mechanobiology and my new lab’s strengths in immunology and metabolism to explore how mechanical cues in tumor microenvironment rewire immune cell metabolism and shape disease progression. In a new city, institute and research field, I encounter new challenges and unfamiliar situations every day. Yet instead of avoiding them as I once did, I now learn to remain calm, adapt to the unknowns and find joys in this process. I often remind myself the spark of enlightenment and discovery often lie on the flip side of uncertainty. I am still practicing and exploring my limit every day, but I am no longer afraid of living with unpredictability.
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