Shirley Sui has a new favorite food: Peking duck.
This summer, the fourth-year neuroscience student spent 10 weeks conducting research, perfecting her Chinese and tasting foreign delicacies at Peking University in Beijing.
Sui and eight other Bruins were the first to participate in a new summer exchange program that was spawned from a science and engineering research partnership between faculty from UCLA and Peking University.
The students were welcomed home last evening with an on-campus reception, where they shared trip highlights with UCLA notables, including Chancellor Gene Block.
The students recalled their visit to Shanghai’s World Expo and laughed after trading a few Mandarin sentences.
At Peking, UCLA students were paired with faculty researchers and assisted in their laboratories daily. Sui’s duties involved extracting cultures from mice to test the expression of two recently discovered proteins. To determine how the proteins are manifested in animals, Sui also spent time blotting, or transferring DNA from one cell to another.
Contrary to her expectations, the research experience was similar to what Sui has done in an imaging lab at UCLA, she said.
“(Chinese researchers) read papers in English, write in English and use the same techniques as we do,” Sui said. “Also, most of the lab equipment is from the U.S. It was a really easy transition.”
Doctoral student Sheng Wei, who studies computer science and is already planning a return trip to Peking, also spoke of his smooth transition into a Chinese lab environment.
Wei worked in a computer hardware design group with three professors and 11 Chinese students. Wei said the team, whose ultimate goal is to bring 3-D television to China, introduced him to cutting-edge research methods he had yet to use in the United States.
Jason Cong, the program’s co-coordinator, said interactions like these are what make the Peking-UCLA research partnership so productive. For years, faculty from the two universities have collaborated on a handful of studies and projects. The schools made their relationship formal in 2008 with the creation of the Joint Research Institute, which sponsored UCLA’s summer program.
“These days we’re dealing with research topics, like health care and information technology, that are global in scope,” Cong said. “So it’s helpful to have international partners with whom faculty can exchange information.”
Robert Cunningham, a fourth-year physics student, said more than scientific information was exchanged during the summer program’s inaugural session. He discovered how to effectively navigate busy streets during his first visit to the country.
When not in the lab, Cunningham spent days exploring ancient temples and nights watching soccer games in local pubs.
“It was impeccable timing that the World Cup coincided with our trip to Beijing,” said Cunningham, who arrived in China with no knowledge of the language. “The games brought tons of foreign students out to socialize.”
Cunningham and his classmate Drew Morton explored Shanghai and Hong Kong after the research program ended, acquiring basic language skills as they ordered taxis and traditional Chinese cuisine.
Morton, a neuroscience doctoral student, said he learned as much from traveling as he did from observing his peers in the lab.
“In China, there were more people than I’ve ever seen in one place,” he told listeners at the reception. “I was humbled, because I realized just how many people there are in this world.
Everybody was so eager to share their culture with me.”
Soaking up culture was the pinnacle of Sui’s summer, she said.
Between hiking the Great Wall, exploring the Forbidden City and haggling with street vendors, she said the student group got authentic tastes of Beijing’s culture.
But the taste she remembers most, of course, is Peking duck.