Chinaza Nnam

I'm originally from Nigeria, where I did my undergraduate degree in biology. During my third year, I had the privilege to intern at our national research facility back in Lagos, and it just ignited a fire in me. I haven't looked back ever since then. I've done everything from looking at rare diseases and so-called neglected tropical diseases to studying huge areas of research such as cancer, and I feel like it's totally made me a well-rounded scientist. My background specifically is cancer research, particularly kidney cancer, and I've been in this space for about 4 years now. I think it's pretty important, and I feel very drawn to this area of research because kidney cancer is actually one of those cancers that its incidence rate is projected to go up as we have aging populations. I study kidney cancer at the molecular level, which means we're studying at the tiny building blocks that make up life forms. Doing this kind of work is really important for translating these answers to questions that we have in research to actually helping patients who suffer from this disease. I'm also multifaceted in my expertise, working in computational biology. I know how to use quantitative skills, including coding, to answer biological questions and analyze what we call big data, which you get when you're studying at the molecular level. It's just a vast amount of data, so knowing how to apply statistics and emerging technologies with AI and coding is really important in order to make sense of the data you're generating in research.