Entering the lab on his first day as a PhD student, Qi-Jing Li "looked like a kid in a candy store," recalls Manuela Martins-Green, Li's doctoral advisor at the University of California, Riverside. Twelve years later, his expression hasn't changed much. Li strolls into his brand-new lab at Duke University Medical Center and shows off his new microscope, equipped with two cameras and a controlled environment chamber for real-time imaging of T-cells. Li is an up-and-coming star in the study of microRNAs and T-cell response, but his path to success was anything but straightforward.
As a child, Li—whose parents were engineers—had no intention of pursuing life science. But a high school teacher changed his mind, and after finishing an undergraduate degree in biochemistry, Li left China for Martins-Green's chemokine laboratory, eager to study cell-to-cell interactions. Li became Martins-Green's most prolific student, publishing over 10 papers in 4 years.
"If you ...
