My graduate mentor, Jun Zeng, is a 3rd year MGM student at the David Lab. Jun grew up in China, where he recounts loving “taking things apart” and learning how things worked. This love for discovery and exploration has carried him to where he is now, researching the microbiomes of cancer patients at Duke. This path was not always the specific plan- no one in his family had expressed a shared interest in research- but rather a product of continuously following his curiosity.
Much of that curiosity was sparked in high school, after reading the book A Short History of Everything by Bill Bryson. Bryson’s book about life and science ranging from chemistry to astronomy highlighted the wonder of science and was a strong factor in Jun pursing the field. In high school he studied slime molds: did you know that they communicate with chemical signaling? They can move? Jun smiles talking about this work, reveling in how unique and complex the organisms were.
When he got to college at the University of Washington in Seattle, he knew he wanted to do research and overloaded his classes the first two years to get ahead on his majors Biology and Microbiology and clear up room for lab work during the rest of his time. Does he recommend this stressful, arguably fanatical decision? No. But did it let him spend the latter half of his college experience primarily in the lab, gaining an abundance of microbiology training? Yes. His lab studied bacterial competition and he was even part of finding a bacterial toxin secretion system that could be used for mitochondrial DNA editing. When asked why he reached out to this lab in particular, Jun’s child-like wonder reemerges: “It’s awesome, I mean it’s bacteria fighting each other. I thought it was cool.”
Jun started the MGM graduate program in 2019 and found his fit at the David lab. While he’s had his fair share of lab-related mishaps- such as lighting a bench with ethanol on fire- he finds joy in wet-lab experiences. He likes the process of doing experiments and prefers bench work to the more academic path of a professor. To that end, he wants to stay in the lab moving forward after graduate school whether that be in an academic lab setting as a researcher or in industry. Having received help from online groups of graduate students when he was applying for grad school, Jun also helps mentor international students from China who are applying for graduate programs in the US. He’s been an exceptionally knowledgeable, friendly, and helpful mentor for me these past few weeks and I’m excited to learn more about his experience with research!
