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The blog is my personal opinion, it does not represent VCU. Information here also does not constitute medical advice. Please consult your medical provider before making any changes to your diet or prescribed medicine. I have been observing how obesity is tightly linked to the degree a person is addicted to sugar, and in general, carbohydrates. When we think of addiction usually we think of it as other people’s problems. When we think of other people’s problems it is easy to j

Today my son was asking me to give him examples of things we can know using all 5 senses. I had to think for a while. Something I can hear, taste, touch, smell and see. To satisfy all 5 senses it had to be an animal that we pet first and then eat maybe 😬 As I walked to pick up my daughter from ice skating, I saw a restaurant, next to a massage place. That made me think which of the 5 senses they are targeting. Inside the ice skating area, there is an arcade; like the one wit

I just finished reading the famous book Don't Believe Everything You Think by Joseph Nguyen. This is an easy to read book full of very deep sentences. You could read through them, or discuss for hours. One clear definition is being able to distinguish what a "thought" is from the action of "thinking". As a simple example, when I see water bottle. A thought is that it is a "water bottle". Thinking could go beyond and describe the color, size, how much it costs, does it match w

Ever since we discussed the iron element in our Sunday School with the girls in my community, I have been thinking about composition, decomposition.. how everything comes together and falls apart in life. Let me walk you through. Imagine you are observing the universe. There are stars, dying stars, supernovas, collapsing and decomposing stars, pieces of an exploded star drifting into the void after the pressurized “BANG!”, some of them making little planets, some of them maki

Imagine a world of a single color, or shades of gray. That would have been pretty dull, simply put. How can contrasts, colors at very different wavelengths come together in a specific way and look pretty? A pink rose popping on a green stem, the moon light in midnight darkness, white cloud on blue sky, mallard on a pond, coral reef underwater, snow piled on brown tree branches. What is it that the human eye or the aesthetic pleasure center in the brain is looking for? What is

I’ve been thinking about the difference between courage and faking it. Can someone be called courageous even if she is, in some way, pretending? Another image comes to mind—a bird (why do I always imagine birds?). This bird claims to be strong, but if you gently lift her feathers, you see carefully placed, inflated balloons instead of muscles. It’s a way of appearing strong. It doesn’t have to be about physical strength, but the image makes the idea easier to see. Chat GPT im

Tonight we watched The Pursuit of Happyness at home during movie time. Will Smith delivers an incredible performance, capturing the emotional weight of poverty while also showing something even more powerful—resilience. That quiet, stubborn determination to keep going, no matter how many times life pushes back. From https://medium.com/@LilyLii/a-dive-into-the-pursuit-of-happiness-106090232749 His job is to sell these expensive bone density scanners to doctors. Just selling tw

I woke up at 5 am to write this blog :) Like the lady in Guldur Guldur show. If you have watched this episode, you will understand the joke here. She says she woke up at 5 am to make bread for her husband, she made the eggs from scratch herself, even the water from scratch putting H and O together :) No worries, we are not going to talk about "that" level of productivity. I wanted to share one insight I have gathered observing my CGM (continuous glucose monitor, you can also

How should we live this life? This is the question floating around in my head as we drive back home from New Jersey. During this trip, we visited what felt like two extremes of a normal distribution: the American Dream Mall and an Amish Village. I'll describe both experiences, but first let me explain what I mean by "two extremes on a normal distribution plot." You've probably heard statements like, "Assuming the samples have a Gaussian distribution, we can perform this stati

Yesterday I went to a reunion in my Postdoc lab at UVA to listen to Dr Gary Owens give the Robert M Berne lecture and saw many of my lab-mates from that time. 🤩 A reunion is almost like time travel, except time indeed passed. Gary is now much older, it has been almost 10 years, but still incredibly sharp. He weaved a beautiful story of decades of work from his lab to paint a picture where inflammation is both necessary and also detrimental when it comes to atherosclerosis an

This year feels special. A good proportion of people from different faith traditions are fasting around the same time, which happens once in 33 years! There is something beautiful about that shared discipline. Ramadan, for me, is more than decorations, iftar gatherings, self-discovery, and celebrating identity. It is also a time to quiet something else — what many now call “food noise.” What Is Food Noise? Recently, I had a thoughtful conversation with my healthcare provider

Hola, indeed, after a long time! I intended to write about my experience in Cancun, Mexico—hoping to paint a picture for curious minds and to amplify my internal gratitude. But before the beaches and crazy bus drivers, let’s reflect on my first semester teaching at VCU. I should probably admit that I had a lot of head scratching the first two weeks. The type of scratching that peels off the crust of a pimple that just healed. My anxiety and scratching gradually settled down t

I wanted to share a bit of exciting news—this fall, I’ll be joining Virginia Commonwealth University as an Assistant Professor of Bioinformatics. 🎉 I’ll be mostly teaching bioinformatics and continuing my research and collaboration efforts 🙏 My curiosity for bioinformatics first bloomed during my postdoc, when I found myself deep in single-cell RNA-seq. I remember puzzling over UMAP: how could something be “not wrong,” and also “not correct”? That question pulled me into th

Today is my second (or maybe third?) day with a sore throat and strep infection. I’m having a hard time swallowing and speaking. I had meant to study and make progress on my collaborative projects or coursework—but then I remembered I still needed to write my London reflections. Before we get to London, though, I should share something closer to home: we now have a flock of parakeets . A total of five babies have hatched, and there are more eggs being kept warm under their ma

We just returned from a 10-day vacation in Europe, and I want to put my experience into words—first, to solidify the memories for my...

Today, I thought about the cartoons my son watches— Paw Patrol and PJ Masks . It’s hard not to go a little crazy watching how...

Today, my mind is dancing around the word “merhamet.” It translates as mercy, compassion, grace, loving-kindness. One of God’s names...

This morning, my mind wandered into the idea of self defense. Walking downtown, I often feel a manageable level of unease—just enough to...

Yesterday, I took my kids to their piano lesson at Melody Magic Studios . The teachers there are not just educators—they’re musicians in...

It is pouring today in RVA. My son was asking "Mommy, why does it rain?" I told him the clouds have so much to carry and they have to...