My career trajectory has been largely inspired by my grandmother. She’s a chemical engineer. It had so much impact on me to see, from a young age, a woman working in STEM. So even though being a scientist (or a woman engineer) is not a very popular career track, I chose Chemistry as my undergrad major. I liked how Chemistry has so many branches—each of them is very different from one another, but all of them are towards understanding the fundamental properties and reactivity of matter. That is very interesting to me. After graduating from college, I decided to follow my passion in Chemistry and continued on the path of being a researcher, so I pursued a PhD in chemistry. In grad school, I was very happy to be in an environment where interdisciplinary research is fostered. Moreover, doing hands-on research is a whole different experience than just reading books and papers. I learned so much from that experience—from organic chemistry to its applications in biomaterials engineering. It trained me to take a transdisciplinary approach when solving questions in science and engineering. That’s what my current lab in bioengineering is doing, and that’s how I want my lab in the future to approach research. Although my academic background sounds like a long-winded path, it is amazing how I was initially inspired by a chemical engineer, and in Fall 2020, I will be starting as a faculty at a chemical and biomolecular engineering department.