NYU Shanghai Student Spotlights - Spencer Smith and Su Han
我们的学生 - Spencer Smith 与 苏汉
This year, NYU Shanghai students clinched the silver medal at the 12th annual iGEM Giant Jamboree in Boston. Dubbed by some as “the world cup of science”, this year's event attracted over 4,000 participants from 250 schools around the world to work on synthetic biology projects aimed at solving real-world challenges. Here, we learn more about two members of the NYU Shanghai team and their outstanding achievement.
今年，上海纽约大学学生团队获得了在波士顿举行的第十届国际基因工程设计大赛银奖。被誉为”科技世界杯“的本次比赛吸引了来自全球250余所学校的4千多名参赛选手， 开发他们的合成生物学项目，旨在以科学解决现实生活中的挑战。让我们来看看两位来自上海纽约大学的参赛选手的故事。Spencer
 My name is Spencer, I was born in New York City, but I was raised right outside of Washington DC in a town called Reston, Virginia. I had initially heard about NYU Shanghai through the college visit I went on in New York City. I wanted to attend NYU in New York, but I can now say that I’m very glad I came to Shanghai. About halfway through my junior year of high school I decided that I was going to change the way I approached life, so instead of looking at a decision and asking myself why I would do something, I started asking myself why I shouldn’t do something.
我叫Spencer，出生于纽约，在弗吉尼亚一个叫做Reston的小镇中长大。最初，我是在去纽约探访大学的旅程中听说上海纽约大学的。本来我想要去的是纽约大学，但是现在我可以说，我很高兴选择了上海。在高三读到一半的时候，我决定我要改变自己的生活方式，从问自己为什么要这么做变成问自己为什么不能这么做。When I was accepted to NYU Shanghai, I asked myself why I shouldn’t go to Shanghai, and none of the reasons I could come up with were very convincing. I didn’t know a word of Chinese but I could learn; I didn’t know anyone going to Shanghai but I like meeting new people; the list goes on.
当我接到上海纽约大学的录取通知时，我就问自己，为什么我不能去上海，我没有想出能够说服我自己不去的理由。我不懂中文，但我可以学，我在上海没有一个熟人，但我很喜欢认识新的朋友。像这样的例子不胜枚举。When I first heard about iGEM I dismissed it, but a friend of mine asked me why I wasn’t going for iGEM, and I couldn’t give her a reason why I shouldn’t do it. So, I went to a couple of meetings and I really liked the other people who were interested in the competition. At that point, I didn’t really care about biology and I didn’t even know what synthetic biology was, but I applied to join officially and I ended up spending my summer working in the biology lab as a part of the NYU Shanghai iGEM team.
我第一次听说iGEM的时候，我没有想要参加，然而，当我的一个朋友问我为什么不参加iGEM的时候，我找不出任何理由来回答她。于是，我参加了几次会议，我也喜欢与其他参与比赛的同伴一起工作。在那时候，我从没有关心过生物学，更不知道什么是合成生物学。作为一个上海纽约大学iGEM参赛队伍的正式队员，我在生物试验室度过了一整个暑假的时间。iGEM was a very unique experience. The project was completely self-motivated; we showed up to the lab every day because we really believed in what we were doing. Most of the time it was hard to see what each step meant in the context of our project, much like fighting smaller battles to win a war. Every experiment we performed was a different battle, and if we ended up losing we would keep going at it, until we eventually won. Sometime around August we had been victorious enough times that our project really started to come together, and that was a really great feeling. It was similar to the sensation of walking out of a classroom after taking a final for a real tough class, but with much greater in magnitude. Of course some days were better than others, as I became intimately familiar with failure over the duration of the summer.
参加iGEM大赛是一个非常独特的经历。它激励了我的主观能动性，我们对我们所做的东西的信心使我们每天都在实验室里工作。很多时候，我们不知道每一个小实验对于整个项目有什么意义，就像通过很小的战役去赢得一场战争。每一次的试验都是一场艰难的战役，如果我们输了，我会站起来继续努力，直到获得最终的胜利。大概是八月的时候，我们赢得了足够多的小战役，我们的项目由量变到质变，那时候的感觉真是太棒了。就像上完了一个非常困难的课程的最后一节课后，走出教室的时候的感觉，不过要比这个更强烈。当然，在经历了一个充满了失败的暑假后，这样的日子给我的感觉自然要好的多了。I firmly believe that the key to having a good iGEM team is the people. The people involved don’t have to be good at any particular discipline, they have to be able to form a cohesive, functioning unit. The resources that our team had at its disposal as a first year team paled in comparison to what other more established teams had. Despite that, we were able to work together and create a project that fared much better than a lot of other proven teams from well-known schools, because we had some seriously creative people on our team, and because learned how to be greater than the sum of our parts.
我坚信，一个好的iGEM团队的关键就是用人。参与的人并不需要擅长于任何一个特定的学科，但是他们必须组成一个有凝聚力和工作效率的团体。作为一个新组建的团队，我们和那些成熟的团队相比有很多劣势。尽管如此，我们通过共同努力，完成了比很多知名学校的成熟团队更好的项目。因为在我们的团队中有不少充满创造力的队员，而且我们还学会了怎么将我们的综合能力发挥到最大。The project we created and presented contained several parts, but the main focus was on generating music based on bacterial growth; we used webcams to track colored bacterial growth on an agar plate, which was translated into musical notes on a step sequencer. Depending on the color expressed by the bacteria, the instrument playing the music would also change. We ended up using biology, computer science, and interactive media arts equally in project.
我们的项目包含了几个部分，其中主要的重点是基于细菌的生长不断变换的音乐，我们用摄像头监视在树脂板上成长的细菌，每种细菌都被标上了不同的颜色，对应着不同的音符。根据细菌颜色的变化，仪器中播放的音乐也会变化。这整个项目中，我们结合了生物学、计算机科学和互动媒体艺术。I personally had never worked on a cooperative project on such a scale before. Spending all day, every day in a lab with my teammates – each with fundamentally different ideas – forced me to, as they say in GPS, reckon with new ideas. To put it simply, I found out through trial and error that sometimes the way something is said is more important than what’s actually said. Other than people skills, lab skills, and general knowledge about biology, IMA and computer science, the most quantifiable thing that I will hold on to from iGEM was meeting students from other schools. We got to meet teams from Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Fudan, Paris-Bettencourt, UCSF, Wesleyan, School of Visual Arts NYC, and dozens of other schools. As we travelled from Shanghai to Beijing to Taiwan and then to Boston, it was so easy and fun to meet other students. Regardless of whether or not they spoke English very well, we shared the common language of iGEM, and that instantly connected us. Our team didn’t win first place at the Giant Jamboree in Boston, but we did make lasting friendships and were finally able to put names to the faces of people we had met online but never in person.
我从来没有参与过这样规模的项目。我和我的队友们每天都在实验室里处理新的想法。简而言之，通过不断地试错，我认识到有时候发现东西的过程要比这个东西本身更重要。除了人际交往能力，实验技术，一般生物学知识，IMA和计算机科学，iGEM大赛中对我最有意义的就是与来自不同学校的学生会面。我们遇到了来自西安交通-利物浦大学、复旦大学、Paris-Bettencourt、UCSF、Wesleyan纽约视觉艺术学院和许多其他学校的学生。我们从上海出发去北京再到台湾，然后转站波士顿，与其他学校学生会面的旅程是那么的轻松和有趣。不论他们的英语是否流利，iGEM永远是我们的共同语言，它将我们联系在了一起。虽然在波士顿的Giant Jamboree上我们的团队没有拿到第一名，但是我们建立了长期的友谊，我们把那些在网上认识的名字和本人一一对上了。As great as our end product was, what I will never forget is the journey that got us there. After graduating from NYU Shanghai, I plan to go to medical school. I want to give a huge shout-out to everyone that I spent the summer with: Ann, Misya, Reida, ZZ, Sohigh, Rachel, Xiangci, June and Lina; for all the good times we had and also for the mistakes, since they brought us closer together. A big thank you to our advisors Professor Li Wenshu and Professor Jungseog Kang, as well as John Robertson and David Fitch, not only for helping us get off the ground but also for helping us stay in the air.
我们的最终成果是很棒的，并且我永远也不会忘记这一路走来的经历。从上海纽约大学毕业后，我打算去进修医学。我想大声的呼喊出大家的名字，那些和我一起度过了这个暑假的伙伴：Ann, Misya, Reida, ZZ, 苏汉, Rachel, Xiangci, June and Lina。为了纪念我们一起度过的美好时光，也为了铭记我们一起遇到的每一次错误，有了它们才有了我们坚实的友谊。非常感谢我们的顾问李文姝教授和Jungseog Kang教授，还有John Robertson和David Fitch，他们不只在开始的时候给我们起步的助力，还为我们成功提供了很多帮助。Suhan My Chinese name is 苏汉, pronounced as Su Han. While I was in high school my friends gave me the nickname “SoHigh”, which has stuck with me into university. I was born in Baoding, which is located in Hebei Province, and I attended high school in Tianjin. I have always been interested in doing interesting things. In Chinese, we say “you yisi” when we find something interesting. This term has several implications including “interest” and “meaningfulness”, to me it basically means I like things that hold my interest and bring meaning to my life. Read more.
我的名字叫苏汉。高中的时候我的朋友给我起了个绰号叫“SoHigh”，我一直这样被叫到大学。我出生于河北保定，高中是在天津上的。我一直对有趣的事情很感兴趣。在中国，当我们发现有趣的事情的时候我们会说：“有意思”。这个词有几种含义，包括“有趣”和“富有意义”，对我来说，这个词就意味着我喜欢的东西，我的兴趣爱好，他们让我的生活充满了意义。I haven’t experienced anything profoundly life changing like war, but I believe every experience in life can be formative. In my life, I have lived in small towns and big cities, I have met people speaking different languages and dialects. I have observed people enjoying peaceful, quiet lives in small towns, and watched others pursuing their dreams in big cities, struggling yet enjoying the struggle. In terms of Kant’s “categorical imperative”, if I wish to find meaning, I must live and experience many things.我没有经历过战争等重大人生变故，但是我相信我的每一次经历对我的人生来说都是必不可少的。我的生活中，我呆过小城镇也住过大都市，我遇到过说着不同语言和方言的人们。我看到那些人在小城镇中享受安宁，过着闲适的生活，也看到那些在大都市中追求自己的梦想，努力奋斗的人们。如果按照康德的“绝对命令”里的说法的话，要想找到我存在的意义，我就要经历更多的事情。NYU Shanghai is one such experience. I have much to say about this school, but at this point I have gotten used to talking about this school to others. I heard about NYU Shanghai from a news story on CCTV, and I fell in love with the name of the school. I really appreciate the opportunities to study away at NYU Shanghai, it allows us to “read columns of books” while “travelling thousands of miles”.
在上海纽约大学学习就是一种经历。对于这所学校我有太多的话要说了，而且我也习惯了和其他人聊这所学校的一切。我是在中央电视台的新闻报道里看到上海纽约大学的，在看到的一瞬间我就爱上了这所学校的名字。我非常荣幸能够在上海纽约大学学习，在这里我能在“行万里路”的同时“读万卷书”。Though NYU Shanghai itself is an experience, it is also a platform which gives students a way to access new experiences such as iGem. 2015 was the first time our school participated in iGEM; our team was relatively “young”, and we lacked a solid research background. However, we were able to go to the competition and do iGEM with NYU Shanghai characteristics – meaning we had a great diversity of majors, half of us were IMA or computer science majors with design or programming experience. Taking stock of our relative strengths, we decided to do a project that combined art, technology, and biology. We synthesized the three disciplines into one project, and so we named our project “synthesized”.
上海纽约大学既是一种体验，它也能够给学生提供一个新的平台，比如iGEM。 2015年是我们学校第一次参加iGEM大赛，我们是一个年轻的团队，缺乏扎实的研究基础。但是我们能够利用上海纽约大学的特点去竞争IGEM大赛。我们队员之间的专业各有不同，分别是来自IMA擅长设计和来自计算机科学专业拥有编程经验。从我们的优点考虑，我们决定把艺术、技术和生物工程捆绑在一起，形成三学科为一体的项目，所以我们给这个项目命名为“合成”I enjoyed the entire process of the project, especially when it came time to show people our results. The positive feedback was overwhelming, and I truly enjoyed the diverse range of reactions we got, from “awesome” and “amazing” to “disorienting” and “crazy”, even the somewhat non sequitur description of it as “cute”. 我非常享受整个项目进行的过程，特别是在我们向所有人展示我们成果的时候。人们的反应不同凡响，我完全沉浸在了人们的赞美声中，我听到了“真棒”和“惊艳”进而又传来了“迷惑”和“疯狂”，甚至我还听到了有点不符合逻辑的“可爱”。 |
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NYU Shanghai Donor Spotlight - Eddie Chen我们的捐赠人 - 陈永岚
My Name is Eddie Chen. I graduated from NYU-Poly in 1996 with an MS in Technology Management. Since then, my career path has crossed numerous industrial sectors. I have been an IT executive, diplomat, senior government official, and a private equity investor. My career has taken me across the world, from the USA to Sweden, from France to China. Currently I am the Managing Director of EURAZEO - a French private equity fund, responsible for China and Asia.我的名字叫Eddie Chen， 1996年毕业于纽约大学理工学院并取得技术管理硕士学位。自那时起，我便开始了横跨多个领域的职业生涯。我做过技术主管、外交官、政府高级官员和私募股 权投资人，从美国到瑞典，从法国到中国，不同的职业让我走遍全球。现在，我任职于一家法国私募股权基金——欧瑞泽（EURAZEO），担任董事总经理，负 责中国和亚洲区的市场。I decided to give to NYU because of its unique global vision. As someone who has lived and worked across the world, I am a strong supporter of NYU’s international perspective, and as someone who was born in Shanghai, I long to see NYU Shanghai become a success. I would like to see my gift to NYU Shanghai go to support programs and majors in healthcare, as China is in shortage of such professionals. 决定捐赠给纽约大学，是因为被她的全球视野所触动。作为一个曾在世界各地生活和工作过的 人，我强烈赞同纽约大学的国际视角，而作为一个土生土长的上海人，我又衷心希望上海纽约大学收获成功。我希望我的捐赠能够支持医疗健康领域的活动和专业， 因为中国现今十分缺乏这方面的专业人才。My son is currently an undergraduate student at NYU-CAS attending NYU in New York, and I believe this is the strongest testimony I can make for my family’s commitment and belief in NYU’s top quality education. My gift to the university was both a gesture of appreciation, and an effort to add value to NYU’s continued development. Click here to read more NYU Shanghai stories.
我的儿子正在纽约大学文理学院攻读本科，我的家人对纽约大学的高质量教育充满了信任和寄托，这是我能为他们做的最坚定的一件事。我的捐赠既是为了表达感激之情，也是希望能为纽约大学的继续发展而倾注一份力量。点击这里阅读更多关于我们的故事。
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