The career, told as a strand.

I build integrated biological data and automation systems that bridge wet-lab experimentation with AI-driven decision-making. My background spans synthetic chromosome engineering within the Yeast 2.0 project, Adaptive Laboratory Evolution, engineering-driven sample preparation, data engineering, advanced data analysis, and scientific software development.

Born in Hong Kong, grew up in Gütersloh (Germany), and spent a high-school semester in Boston, then studied biology in the Alps at Innsbruck University. From there a research-track MSc in Molecular Biology and Biotechnology in Groningen (with a 2017 stint as iGEM lab manager), and a research stretch engineering microbial communities at NUS Singapore that flipped my view from "biology is interesting" to "biology is engineerable".

Then Berlin. At Leonyte Biosystems I worked in a cross-disciplinary team of engineers, scientists, and business operators, building a food-pathogen detection system in a fast-paced startup, down to the 3D-printed microfluidic sample-prep devices it ran on. At Uber I built data dashboards for marketplace operations to support the launch of Uber Eats in Germany.

During the PhD (Paulsen & Williams Group, Macquarie) I worked on the global Yeast 2.0 project, contributing to synthetic chromosomes synXIV and synXVI, designing a 181 kb essential neo-chromosome that carries 75 backup genes to keep SCRaMbLE viable when it would otherwise kill the cell, running pulsed and parallel ALE to debug fitness defects, full NGS pipelines, and an NLP platform that read 23k synthetic-biology papers so I didn't have to.

The pattern that connects all of it: interfaces between biology, data, and code. I'm at my best when the problem looks like "this scientific workflow is held together with Excel and prayer — fix it" or "these agents could discover the next yeast strain if only they had the right substrate". I built agflive.com from scratch. I built Welly because no one had a sane growth-curve viewer (2,500+ monthly users now). I shipped a 10-agent hypothesis system because the paper was published and I wanted to see it actually work.

The goal: platforms that move biotech toward self-driving experimentation and scalable, computationally guided discovery.

Outside the lab I DJ as Dr. Dissonance (melodic minimal, deep house, techno; 4,500-track library, no apologies), fly a drone over Sydney landscapes, and write generative art that occasionally crashes the browser. I keep a keen interest in geopolitics, having listened to quite literally every Economist podcast of the last five years, and I kitesurf whenever Sydney's wind lets me.