Hi!
My name is Min Ya (闵娅), and I go by Minya in English. Welcome!
Currently, I’m a postdoctoral researcher at Prof. Yaowu Yuan’s lab at the University of Connecticut. I obtained my Ph.D. in Aug. 2021 at Harvard University, mentored by Prof. Elena Kramer.
I was born and raised in Chengdu, which is my favorite and undoubtedly the best (maybe subjective) city in China. I went to college at Sichuan University in Chengdu, and exchanged to Hokkaido University (Japan) in my junior year. During my time in Japan, I joined Prof. Fujita Tomomichi ‘s lab and this experience made me start to consider pursuing a career in academia. I love research, I love plants, and I love research on understanding plants!
After college, I was accepted to the Erasmus Mundus Master Programme in Evolutionary Biology (MEME), a EU-funded 2-year program joint between 4 European universities and Harvard University. I started my MEME journey at Uppsala University (Sweden), then moved to Université Montpellier 2 (France) where I worked with Prof. Eric Imbert, subsequently to Harvard University with Prof. Elena Kramer, and to Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (Germany) in my final semester to work with Prof. Susanne Renner at the Munich Botanic Garden. Upon completion, I obtained Dual M.S. Degree in Evolutionary Biology at Uppsala University and University of Montpellier II.
MEME has provided me with these unique opportunities to study at universities in different countries, with different cultures, and conduct research in different sub-fields of biology to find out where my real passion lies. That’s why it took me almost no time to make the decision to continue Ph.D. at the Kramer lab - I have already discovered floral evo-devo is my jam and I cannot ask for a better mentor than Elena!
Fast forward to our current timeline, I still love research, still love plants, and still love research on understanding plants! Plant evo-devo research is a perfect mixture of molecular lab work, computational analysis, and microscopy. It allows me to spend a lot of time with my plants, documenting their details at all levels, from macroscopic to microscopic, from genes to genomes.
For details about my research, please visit my research page. Check out this interview I did with the Plants Are For Everyone blog and my feature from the spotlight series of the Botanical Society of America.
You can also watch my PhD defense here:
Some fun non-academic facts about me: 1) I have pig DNA in me from a skin transplant because a monkey almost bit off my finger when I was four; 2) I’ve been playing piano since five-year old; 3) I made subtitles for Japanese anime for a year; 4) I’m a big fan of heavy metal and hardcore metal, and I have been to hundreds of rock concerts.
If you have any questions, please feel free to reach me on twitter, or email: minyaaa9058@gmail.com.