Qinqin Huang

Qinqin Huang moved from China to Australia in 2015 for her PhD, and moved to the UK in 2019 to start her postdoc in medical genomics at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. She has been promoted to a Staff Scientist position and taken more responsibilities in the group.

To Qinqin, this is a great alternative to the perhaps more 'traditional' career path which is to become a group leader in academia. In this role, she can analyse data and do cool science in a world-leading institute as before, but without worrying too much about job insecurity.

"I grew up in town on the east coast of China. Both my parents went to university and my dad did engineering, but I was the first to have a post graduate degree in my family. No one else in my family is a scientist, and they didn’t know what it meant to be a geneticist (neither did I!), so I didn’t get much advice on career development from my family or family friends. However, it all turned out well – I did more maths and statistical courses in university and did a PhD in computational genetics because I didn’t like lab work, and I am a computational geneticist and I love what I am doing now."

Qinqin has never got rid of imposter syndrome, even after her supervisor expressed several times her value to the group, but she has also realised that many colleagues around her, including the smartest and most amazing people, also suffer from it more or less, which makes she feel belonged.