Weelic Chong ’15

January 2014

Bioluminescent Organisms

Weelic Chong ’15 who studies biochemistry and neuroscience, will be spending this January researching bioluminescent organisms in Japan. He will join Darrin Schultz ’13, who is currently pursuing a Fulbright and hoping to give trees bioluminescent qualities so that they can emit light at night. Weelic will not only be spending time in the lab crunching data and conducting gene purification, he’ll also be out catching deep-sea glowing organisms off the coast of Japan. “The collaboration of science,” as Weelic aptly puts it, “transcends international boundaries,” and data shared across countries often transcends language barriers. Weelic will spend the following spring semester at Waseda University as part of the Japan Study Consortium program. Upon his return to campus he plans to act out an improvised performance of a typical day in the lab and examine the different ways that different countries and cultures think about science.