As a child in Chengdu, China, Yilong Zhou loved to play with Legos. But it wasn’t until he was an undergraduate at Tsinghua University pursuing biochemistry and bioengineering that he understood that molecules, like Legos, are the bricks that form the structures of biology.
“I understood that these pieces can also be put together to create drugs that could help many patients in the world, and I became very interested in that,” he said. “But I realized that to understand the technologies behind these drugs, I needed to know about how the body’s defense mechanism works.”
To learn more about immunology and immunoengineering, Zhou enrolled in University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering’s (UChicago PME) Master of Engineering program.
Within the program’s Bio- and Immunoengineering track, he’s learning the principles of immunology and cellular engineering while also getting a chance to conduct research.
“I found that this program matched my interests,” he said. “You learn both the basics and how it is applied to technologies, like CAR T-cell therapies for cancer. You take both a science and an engineering approach.”
Not content to just take courses throughout the one-academic-year program, Zhou also joined the lab of Assoc. Prof. Jun Huang, where he will work with other graduate students on advances in CAR T-cell therapies, which genetically engineer a patient’s T cells to find and attack cancer. “This is also just like Legos,” he said. “You put pieces together for receptors to recognize cancer cells, which is very interesting.”