Xi Emmett Peng 彭玺 Péng Xǐ

For a long time, I thought science was mainly about learning what other people had already discovered. I grew up in an exam-oriented education system, so I was used to seeing biology as a body of established knowledge that I needed to understand and remember. Even in the lab, experiments often meant repeating something to demonstrate a principle when the answer was already known. After years of studying biochemistry, genetics, and molecular biology, I still was not sure what kind of science I really wanted to pursue. I enjoyed biology, but the experiments I was doing often felt like tiny pieces of a much bigger picture that I had not yet learned how to see.

That started to change when I began graduate training in ecology. Instead of focusing only on molecules and cells, I began thinking about populations, communities, and ecosystems. This also changed the way I understood research. I became interested in how microorganisms, although they exist as individual cells, are also part of much larger systems. The ways they interact, compete, cooperate, communicate, and carry out metabolism connect the microscopic world to the environment around them. Studying microbial communities also showed me that interesting scientific questions rarely fit neatly within a single discipline. Biology often overlaps with chemistry, physics, mathematics, computer science, and even some of the ideas we use to understand social systems.

Looking back, I now think that finding a research direction is about more than choosing a topic. It also means finding the scale and point of view that make the world most interesting to you. You may not see that perspective clearly at the beginning. It often takes shape slowly, as you move from learning answers that are already known to discovering the questions you truly want to ask.