2025-07-01

Clara, Grace, and Nieh Tzu (First three from the left at the front) join the lab as summer interns! Clara is from the University of Chicago and interested in biophysics and quantitative dynamics of yeast. Grace and Nieh Tzu are from National Chung Hsing University （中興大學）and are helping out on our new plant synthetic biology project.

2025-06-25

Chia-Yi and Li-Wei has been in the lab for more than a year! They have been using their spare time trying to figure out why it may be important for Bacillus bioflims to spatially pattern their sporulation events.

This is their final presentation at Yung-Chun Senior Highshool. Jian-geng is sitting in the crowd of proud moms and dads knowing exactly how they feel!

2025-03-25

Dr. Enrique (Rico) Rojas from New York University was invited as a keynote speaker for the Q-microbio Symposium and also gave a great talk on the mechanical regulations of Cell-wall expansion based growth at IPMB.

Rico was a lot of fun to be with! We spent a day and a half in Raohe night market （饒河夜市）, Tamsui (淡水), the Dadaocheng （大稻埕）streets, and the Palace (故宮) museum. We essentially talked about everything from science to history. Rico didn’t hesitate to try out the punching game in the night market!

2025-03-24

This is my first time co-organizing a symposium!

Keita Kamino from IMB, Wei-Hsiang Lin from IMB, Hong-Yan Shih from IOP and I decided that we have extra time(x) that we should get a Quantitative Microbiology community going locally. This idea became a mini-symposium and here we are!

We are honored to invite Victor Sourjik (Max Plank), Gene-Wei Li (MIT), Matthew Baker (University of New South Wales), Greg Huber (UCSF), Namiko Mitarai (Niels Bohr Institute), Enrique Rojas (NYU), Fangwei Si (Carnegie Mellon), Andrew Utada (University of Tsukuba), and Yilin Wu (Chinese University of Hong Kong), as well as local friends Chien-Jung Lo, Yu-Ling Shih. Together we had a great two-day symposium that covers topics from bacterial motility and collective behaviors, to microbial growth and morphogenesis, dynamics in gene regulatory and metabolic network, and to population and community dynamics.

It’s great as a first experience. Exhausting when organizing, but by the ends of the symposium it’s obviously well worth it. We’ll probably do it again next year!

2025-03-01

JB from Tâm Mignot’s lab joins today as a postdoc!

JB used to work on Myxococcus xanthus rippling as an emergent phenomenon of collective migration behavior. We met at the Genome and Systems Biology symposium, and during the visit, JB got interested in how Bacillus synchronize to form collective patterns.

The first task is to figure out a Mandarin name for him in the Taiwanese administrative system…we eventually rejected all the nonsense Ian suggested and did “尚巴提”!

2025-02-20

Welp it was meant to be a year-end feast of 2024, but we wanted to go to 島語!!!! It was well worth the wait. The seafood was great among all the other options in the all-you-can-eat buffet. This is also the farewell party for Jo-Tung. It was nice having you here!

2024-12-30

The lab picked a rare sunny day and took the train to Hou Dong just one hour away from Academia Sinica.

Hou Dong used to be a major coal mining town so it’s cool to learn the culture and history. But what we spent an afternoon with were the caaaaaaats! So many cats!

2024-11-01

Wen-Han was trained as a pathogenic fungal geneticist, but wanted to switch gears and learn to look at genetics with a more quantitative perspective. He’ll be learning mathematical modeling from scratch.

Welcome in, Wen-Han!

2024-10-01

Wei-Ting (黃薇庭) is currently a master’s student in GSB. She’ll be joining the Bacillus biofilm side of the lab! First student!

Welcome in, Wei-Ting!

2024-09-01

Jo-Tung Yin (尹若彤) joins our lab as an undergraduate intern!

Jo-Tung is currently an undergraduate studying in the Department of Microbiology in Soochow University （東吳大學）. She has actually been around the lab for a semester now spending a few hours here and there every week. Starting from this semester she has more free time in the lab and is ready to handle a specific project! She is teaming up with Kevin to ask how bacterial cells talk with each other to collectively form developmental patterns within a complex biofilm.

2024-08-01

Kuan-yu Lin (林冠妤) joins our lab as a post-doc!

Kuan-yu has been a great plant virologist in Dr. Na-Sheng Lin’s lab. After Dr. Na-Sheng Lin’s retirement and the conclusion of her NSTC project, Kuan-yu now begins her new career in our lab!

Kuan-yu may be new to dynamic systems theory and mathematical modeling, but she has been an independent researcher for years, and has great expertise in cell biology and biochemical experiments. She will be asking whether our theories truely reflects driving force of bi-polar growth in the fission yeast.

2024-03-25

Ian (許聖言) joins our lab as our first post-doc!

Ian is interested in how a dynamical system evolves. Ian used to work on how the intrinsically disordered region of a critical stress-response gene affects the stochastic pulsing in the dynamics of its expression. From its dynamics and sequence divergence in different species within Ascomycota, Ian and colleagues showed that such stochastic pulsing is likely functional and under purifying selection.

We are very fortunate to recruit Ian from Nice. He has research experience in dynamical systems theory, yeast cell biology, molecular evolution, and is super fun to be with! With us, he’ll be tackling specific questions broadly within the scope of how the polarity system evolved within Ascomycota.

2024-02-21

The Lab is ready to roll!

After some back and forth in design and some remodeling, I’m pretty happy to call this new space our home. The idea of the space is to facillitate organic discussions. We have so many whiteboards and drinks and snack to go with it!

For the lab warming party, Chih-Hang from across the hall made a cake that has Turing pattern on it <3

2024-01-19

MiTalk was an amazing yearly symposium on microbiology held by the young scholars and for the young scholars. It has a unique popular science vibe and this year was in the beautiful Hwalien City on the east coast of Taiwan. We had a good time getting to know what other microbiologists are up to and quite a few talks are really cool!

2023-12-21

Year-End fest with Ting-Ying’s lab, Laysan’s lab and Ka-Wai Ma!

They told me we were going to 饗饗 for an afternoon tea…and I took it literally! I had no idea 饗饗 was a high-end all-you-can-eat buffet and it was good!! Only problem is I had lunch approximately 2 hrs before we went …. not stopping me = =+.

2023-10-03

Our lab is basically just ruins for now …

Our interior designer gave us this nice 3D rendering of our office space. If all goes well it will be completely remodeled by the end of the year!

2023-09-18

Yu-Hsin （張郁欣）filled up the lab manager position. Thank you and welcome in!

Yu-Hsin is finishing her PhD degree on plant RNA biology in the joint program between IPMB and the Institute of Plant Science in National Taiwan University. While waiting to finish up she agreed to join my lab when we needed her the most. She will help us set up various systems in the lab.

We will also work on how the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe switches between polarity modes. Unfortunately, Yu-Hsin used to work with plants and I used to work with the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae … Well, they say a good PhD training can get a person to solve any unknown problem. Let’s see how far two PhD trainings get us!

2023-09-01

Kevin （陳楷文）joins the lab the same day I do. Welcome in!

He used to work on the photosystem fo cyanobacteria as an undergrad and a master student in National Taiwan University. He’ll be starting off with the patterning mechanisms of bacterial bioflims.

Kevin is an experienced microbiologist but he’s starting to learn some dynamic modeling. He has a surprisingly good appreciation of dynamic behaviors though, and he seems eager to do some coding!

Well…at least before he starts to see those error messages…

2023-09-01

Having spent 10 years in the US, I’m finally back to Taiwan, home sweet home.

We’re in the building right next to the one I stayed at between 2012-2013 as a research assistant. The people, the core facilities, and the science being done here all updated quite a bit. The familiar faces and humid breeze cannot be more welcoming.

Now I just need to know where the parties are. Purely for scientific purposes of course.