Dinner with two of the three most important women in my life: my mum Queenie Leung and my PhD supervisor Prof Elaine Holmes (the third being my Grandma).
How did this meeting come about: In the final year of my first degree (BSc Biology at Imperial), I decided to do a 1-year Masters while applying for medicine at the University of Hong Kong. That year, the MRes in Biomedical Research run by the Faculty of Medicine at Imperial launched a new stream: Microbiome in Health and Disease. At the time, microbiome was a new research area that I knew little about, except that I had done modules on microbiology and immunology. It was my mum who told me all the exciting things she’d read about gut microbiota and suggested that I pick this stream. And so, I met Elaine who supervised me for the first 6-month research project working on gut microbiota in early preterm infants.
I enjoyed the research a lot. I learnt as much as I could and was keen explore new ways to analyse the data. Elaine said to me: Don’t do medicine just yet. Do a PhD with me first. Then you can do medicine after. At that point, if I was given the choice of both – PhD at Imperial or Medicine at HKU, I wouldn’t be able to choose. But HKU rejected my med school application (thx in retrospect). So PhD was the only path forward.
Through the PhD years, both Elaine and Queenie supported me a lot in unbelievable ways. I am immensely lucky to be mentored by these two amazing women, each spectacularly successful in their own fields. I learnt so much from their attitude, their work ethic, and the way they work with and inspire people.
When I was finally completely done with the PhD, Queenie said, let’s go to Perth to thank Elaine (Elaine relocated to Perth a few years ago). I said, are you serious? As I was planning my trip to Perth in Dec 2023 for research reasons, Queenie said she wasn’t gonna be able to make it as she had a tight schedule that month. It was only a week before the trip that she suddenly said she could make it due to some changes to her diary. And so, this meeting of a lifetime happened.
For me, it was incredible to see these two role models of mine from two separate worlds meeting each other. Both seemed to be pleasantly surprised by each other, given their different backgrounds but similar interests, and in some ways, character as well. It was wonderful for me to get to spend time with each of them in the beautiful city of Perth.
Abellona U 