Page 22 - Gerald Choa Memorial Fund Annual Report 2018-19

THANK YOU NOTES

Henry LAW (Medicine Year 3)

Awardee of Gerald Choa Memorial Fund
Overseas Exchange Scholarship 2018–19

I am really happy to have been selected as an awardee of
the Gerald Choa Memorial Fund Overseas Exchange
Scholarship 2018–19. I owe the Gerald Choa Memorial Fund
Committee a great debt of gratitude and I promise that I
would utilise the award money to advance my studies and
contribute to Hong Kong in the future.

The scholarship is a tremendous help to my financial
situation, as medical textbooks and other books that I am (Centre) Henry LAW
really fond of are quite expensive. I love reading books of
different academic fields so as to broaden my horizons and expand my circle of competence in different areas. One of my
favourite books is One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way, written by UCLA psychologist Dr. Robert
MAURER. The book stresses that innovations, as defined to be tremendous changes in lifestyle or corporate culture, are very
likely to fail in the end as neuroscience suggests that big alternations tend to produce mental aversions, so that we are less
likely to work towards our goals. Instead, we can make changes in the kaizen way, which is to improve little by little, and
accumulate the efforts into a big snowball which will bring drastic effects in the end.

The scholarship can help me ease my financial burden, so I can better allocate my time between my part-time job and my
studies and reading, which is conducive to my academic development. Besides, it is also helping me to participate in
different summer programmes. I have always been longing for a chance to study in prestigious overseas universities, to
exchange ideas with people from different regions of the world and of various cultural backgrounds as such interactions can
stimulate new innovations and boost creativity. Through the blending of ideas with people of different interests and
backgrounds, I can definitely learn more about the latticework of mental models of different people, which is a concept
proposed by Mr. Charlie MUNGER, the Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. I am really grateful for being able to do a
summer internship in Gerstein Lab, Yale University, under the supervision of Dr. Shaoke LOU. We worked on the problem of
predicting target genes of enhancers using multiple epigenomic features such as DNA methylation and ChIP-seq signals.
Although the research is still underway when my internship ended, I learnt a lot during my journey in both computer science
and bioinformatics. I strongly believe that machine-learning and artificial intelligence will be the driving force of the next
decade in solving the most complex biological problems, and will hopefully unravel the secrets behind cancer and other
deadly diseases. The internship experience has inspired me to work as a research undergraduate at Yip Lab of CUHK, and I
am now working on a multi-omics analysis project of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC). The scholarship has exposed me to
many possibilities and I am really thankful to everyone whom I met during my journey.

Once again, my sincere gratitude goes out to the donors and to all those involved for selecting me to be one of the
scholarship awardees. I will definitely use the money to expand my field of knowledge and gain international exposure for my
future role as a doctor.

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