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After securing his degree, he went on to complete his Master of Science in 2019 and spent the next three years working as a lab research project coordinator at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, which kept him very busy especially when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n By late 2021, the chaos of the pandemic had calmed a little. It was time for him to set out towards his next goal: a PhD.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n He applied to several Ivy League schools, but despite having achieved some recognition \u2013 including getting published in prestigious journals Nature Microbiology and Nature Communications \u2013 he was genuinely surprised to secure an interview with Harvard in December 2021.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n By Christmas that year, it was official: he would read his PhD at Harvard Medical School.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n “My mum was so happy, she was yelling for like five minutes,” he recalled with a wide smile.<\/span><\/p>\n It was, however, a bittersweet occasion. Dr Tan’s father, then 82, had recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and had already begun to lose some memory function.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n “But I remember him still being really, really happy for me,” he said.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n “It was almost a way of me repaying all (my parents’) sacrifice and all the amazing things that they’ve done for me. I could tell them: ‘I finally made it to Harvard’.”<\/span><\/p>\n Now, while he celebrates his newly minted title of “doctor”, he is already chasing the next pinnacle: pursuing post-doctoral research in the area of neurodegenerative diseases.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n According to Dr Tan, his father is now a shell of his former self, having lost a lot of his ability to retain short\u2011term memories. Having spent the last five years watching his father fight the losing battle against Alzheimer’s, he is set on contributing to the birth of a potential therapy.<\/span><\/p>\n He dreams of eventually returning to Canada to start his own research lab at the University of Toronto \u2013 the same place where he got his start in academia.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n “I know that any of the research that I do now probably won’t be helping my father directly, but I still want to be able to contribute towards something that is able to cure this disease, hopefully in the future.”<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n After securing his degree, he went on to complete his Master of Science in 2019 and spent the next three years working as a lab…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":67812,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2611],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-67811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-buzz-headlines","wpcat-2611-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=67811"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67811\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/67812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=67811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=67811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=67811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}CHASING NEW DREAMS<\/span><\/h2>\n
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