My name is Ziwei Li.
We're at UCLA and I work specifically in Dr. Amander Clark's lab.
I conduct research on stem cells to actually figure out how stem cells can be applied to
regenerative medicine and in particular I'm interested in infertility, so to cure people
to are not going to have babies.
The life in the Clark lab is actually very natural to me.
I don't feel very, I don't feel any awkwardness to blend in with people although I came from
another country.
I would justify that scientists are not nerds so we do socialize.
We do communicate with each other.
So I think it's a pretty pleasant work environment especially in the Clark lab, probably in the
whole floor because we don't walls separating different labs so we know other people in
other labs pretty well actually and we have...
So we know that for infertile couples sometimes they don't have functional gametes, sperm
and eggs.
And regenerative medicine in this case is to create sperm and eggs in a dish which is
our final goal to actually help them to fertilize and have babies.
Oh, he's just so cute.
So my daily routine will be including cultured cells so a lot of them will be culturing stem
cells and try to differentiate them to early sperm and
eggs and test whether my differentiating actually working.
I'm currently working on a gene called PRMT5.
It's required for the germ line formation in humans and in mammalians basically and
it's also implied to have a role in cancer formation.
I use trifocal microscopy a lot so you can see very tiny structures within a cell.
I also use a lot of molecular devices such as a PCR machine or real time PCR machine
to look at gene expression levels among different types of cells.
The tissue culture hoods, there's a machine that we just do a lot of tissue culture in
there to make sure the cultures are sterile without any bacteria contaminations and that
could be used for transplantations models and other injections context.
When we work we work hard and when we are done with our work we talk to each other,
have fun conversations about movies and what do we do during weekends.
In the society nowadays there are a lot of people that actually it's a growing percentage
of productive population that is sterile, probably due to environmental factors or other
factors and I think this is a huge problem because as a sexual reproductive species,
I think being able to regenerate ourselves are very important so it's a very critical
health problem to solve.
My dreams are to actually help the sterile couples to create functional gametes for them
to fertilize and have cute babies without any problems, then that will be very fancy
for me.