Greetings! I graduated from Wellesley College in 2013, with Honors in Africana Studies. I joined the Tetel lab in January 2010, and through the Sophomore Early Research Program, I worked alongside Christina Sun in investigating the role of membrane estrogen receptors in estrogen signaling using a transgenic mouse that expressed membrane only estrogen receptor-α, using immunohistochemistry and confocal analysis. 

My passion for research went beyond the laboratory. During my junior year, I decided to switch majors, from Biochemistry to Africana Studies (one of the beauties of liberal arts education), and focus on policy analysis. My thesis research investigated Eswatini’s (formerly Swaziland) position in achieving the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals by target year 2015. I was awarded the Pamela Daniels Fellowship, which enabled me to travel to Eswatini and produce a short documentary that featured dialogues with key leaders and women in the country, with a focus on the local economy, agriculture, and female empowerment. My research was featured on Wellesley College’s homepage.

I am also a scholar of the United World College Red Cross Nordic. As a multiracial woman (Taiwanese, Saudi Arabian, Indian Subcontinent, Mozambican, and Swati influences), this has been one of the few places where I’ve truly felt at home, studying and living with students from over 88 countries, with a wide range of cultures and races represented. After Wellesley College, I went on to pursue public health studies at Indiana University’s Fairbanks School of Public Health. Thereafter, I decided to return to Eswatini with my spouse and invest in my home country. We’re designing and manufacturing the lightest caravans in the world, using aerospace and automotive technology. Wellesley College chemistry classes and labs focusing on acids and amines have certainly come in handy as we build panels in-house, sourcing in chemicals and high tech materials from across the globe.

I’ve learnt that the process of developing a business is never straightforward, and invention requires flexibility – at the policy level and the product level. Our company has made great strides in the country, working directly with cabinet ministers and numerous government organizations in order to facilitate formation and carry out directives for regulatory framework necessary to support our manufacturing and cross border movement. Building a new industry in a country that is primarily based in textile and agriculture is immense.

I strongly believe in gender equality and female empowerment, and have used my position in our company to engage with females from a wide range of backgrounds, from general illiterate laborers to females with experience in unrelated industries, to be equipped with specialized skill set for caravan manufacturing. The challenges have been extraordinary, and I believe the rewards will be equally so, particularly for female empowerment in my community. In local industry, women hold predominantly low-level positions and form the majority in the nation’s primary industry of textiles, but few are even paid a taxable wage. We need more women advancing in industry and particularly STEM-driven programs.

Outside of work, I am raising my daughter, who is fluent in two languages, and picking up a third. I enjoy running in the great outdoors where I occasionally bump into zebra, impala, kudu, waterbuck, and other wildlife in a 400 hectare game reserve located at the vicinity of my home in one of Eswatini’s treasured locations (south of the Manzini region). I also photograph everyday life in the Kingdom of Eswatini.