A Prism of Life: Meet Keystone’s young biologists who are rethinking health, ethics, and access
What paths lie ahead for young people who choose to study biology?
Some may become doctors, healing patients and saving lives. Some may become scientists, studying the mysteries of genes and disease. Others may look beyond the laboratory, asking philosophical questions about the ethical boundaries of emerging technologies such as gene editing or brain–computer interfaces.
For the four Keystone Academy seniors featured in this Graduate Profile series, biology is not a single road but a starting point. It connects to public health, philosophy, social justice, and the search for new ways to make knowledge accessible.
Two of them, Grace Yu and Yvonne Li, have spent all twelve years of their schooling at Keystone. As founding students, they grew up alongside the school itself, exploring their interests in an environment that encouraged independence and curiosity.
The other two, Jacqueline Fan and Anna Xiang, arrived later. Both transferred to Keystone during their secondary school years and quickly found a place where they could slow down, reflect, and discover what truly mattered to them.
All four share a love of biology, yet each approaches it differently.
Yvonne hopes to combine dentistry with public health, focusing on healthcare equity for marginalized groups.
Jacqueline brings philosophy and biology together to explore the ethical boundaries of emerging technologies.
Anna studies mental health from both biological and social perspectives.
Grace works to ensure that visually impaired students can also participate in science and research.
Seen together, their stories form a kind of prism. Biology is the light passing through it; what emerges are distinct colors from different interests, different questions, different ways of understanding the world.
More Than a Smile: Yvonne Li’s path toward compassionate care
On one summer day of 2025 in California, Yvonne Li rose before the sun.
At four in the morning, she was already awake.
An hour later, she was in the car, accompanying an anesthesiologist to a dental clinic.
The doctor traveled between clinics, providing general anesthesia for patients with special medical needs. In that week, they had already visited two clinics. This was the third.
Most dental procedures require only local anesthesia. But some patients, including people with autism or intellectual disabilities, cannot undergo treatment safely without it.
That morning, they met a patient in her thirties.
As the nurse tightened the tourniquet and tried to draw blood, the patient repeated the same three words.
“I love you.”
The first attempt failed. The nurse tried again.
“I love you.”
Still no blood. The nurse tried drawing from her ankle.
“I love you.”
The words sounded gentle and warm, yet Yvonne felt a quiet ache. The patient was an adult, but she looked almost like a helpless child, repeating those words again and again as if they were a shield against fear.
The experience stayed with her.
In a healthcare system driven by efficiency, the people who most need patience and companionship are often the easiest to overlook. For the first time, Yvonne began to think seriously about what compassionate care might mean in practice.
After that day, she consciously slowed down. She spent more time explaining procedures to patients and their families. Sometimes she stayed with patients even after anesthesia had worn off, simply to make sure they felt safe.
The internship was not her first experience in dentistry. Earlier, she had worked at a clinic in Beijing. But there she had never encountered patients like these.
In China, many people with severe disabilities rarely receive dental care. They remain largely invisible.
Yvonne hopes that one day they will not.
A childhood dream
Her dream of becoming a dentist began early.
When she was small, her mother often took her and her sister to the dentist. In the waiting area, there was a children’s simulation corner with a dental chair and toy instruments.
Every visit turned into a game. Yvonne would play the dentist, while her sister would be the patient. Long before she understood what the profession involved, the idea had already taken root.
Her interest in biology followed soon after.
In third grade, she joined a Keystone biology summer program. She barely remembers the details of the course now, but one moment remains vivid: the first time she held real laboratory equipment and dissected a frog.
The experience fascinated her.
From then on, she pursued biology enthusiastically. She competed in several biology competitions overseas, and, with classmates, developed an aptamer-based detection method for Alzheimer’s disease for the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition.
Outside the laboratory, she paid close attention to how health and medicine appeared in everyday life. One trip to Yunnan left a lasting impression.
To escape the crowds in Shangri-La, her family visited Niding, a remote village in Xizang, several hours away by mountain road. The houses clung to the hillside, and most villagers made their living collecting mushrooms.
Medical resources were scarce.
One evening, Yvonne saw a mother rubbing tsampa oil onto her child’s forehead. The child had a fever, and this traditional method was the only treatment available.
The moment stayed with her.
During the following days, she spoke with villagers and learned that many elderly residents suffered from chronic joint pain. It became worse throughout the winter, sometimes preventing them from getting out of bed.
Years of climbing the mountains for work had placed immense strain on their knees, Yvonne thought. She realized this while staying with a family whose 80-year-old grandmother woke before sunrise to herd cattle and pick mushrooms.
Back at school, she decided to act.
Together with several friends, she spent six months developing a remote medical consultation platform for the village. The system allowed residents to connect with volunteer doctors through video calls. For villagers unfamiliar with smartphones, the village head could assist with scheduling and communication.
Eight volunteer doctors now provide free consultations through the platform.
The project was not a school assignment nor a required Creativity, Activity, Service (CAS) output. It grew simply from her desire to help.
She named it Tashi (བཀྲ་ཤིས་), a word by Xizang residents for “blessing.”
Looking ahead
Yvonne has been admitted to the University of Michigan, where she plans to study public health before pursuing dentistry in graduate school.
Her experiences, both in clinics and in remote communities, have convinced her that technical expertise alone is not enough. Healthcare must also address inequality and access.
She has decided to return to China after graduation and promote compassionate healthcare, with a simple goal: to become a dentist who sees patients not just as cases, but as people.
Science and the Soul: Jacqueline Fan’s journey between biology and philosophy
When Jacqueline Fan stood near Mount Kailash and witnessed a sky burial for the first time, she felt an unexpected sense of calm.
Monks chanted prayers while the family of the deceased stood quietly nearby. There was no wailing, no dramatic display of grief. Instead, there was a quiet acceptance.
For the Xizang residents present, death was not an end but a transformation—it was the beginning of another cycle of life.
Watching the ritual, Jacqueline found herself thinking about her grandfather.
Questions after loss
Four years have passed, but Jacqueline still cannot forget her grandfather.
Even now, she remembers the small moments they shared. When she was six, he would take her out for “a walk” or “a haircut,” only to secretly bring her to a fast-food restaurant. Together, they would eat fried chicken—something the rest of the family considered unhealthy—while her then-80-year-old lǎo ye smiled mischievously over his ice cream.
At the time, she lived in Hong Kong due to her mother’s work. Because of this, Jacqueline was often looked after by her aunt, yet the teenager often locked herself in her bedroom.
Her grandfather’s visits filled an otherwise lonely childhood with warmth.
Later, he developed Alzheimer’s disease.
In his final years, he was also diagnosed with leukemia.
When he died in 2022, Jacqueline was left with questions that had no easy answers.
What is death?
Where do people go when they die?
If the body disappears, does anything remain?
She began reading philosophy, enrolling in online courses and searching for ideas that might help her understand.
Discovering philosophy at Keystone
In Grade 9, Jacqueline moved from Hong Kong to Beijing and enrolled at Keystone. Her Chinese language skills were still developing, but the school’s Chinese Thread and interdisciplinary learning attracted both her and her mother.
Soon after arriving, she joined the Theory of Everything philosophy club led by Professor Sun Zhongyao. The club was part of the Keystone Activities Program (KAP).
Theory of Everything explored questions that rarely appear in ordinary classrooms: religion, politics, ethics, the future of technology.
Here, Jacqueline discovered a community of students who enjoyed asking difficult questions.
During one discussion, she again raised the topic that had been on her mind for years: death.
Classmates offered different perspectives. Some believed people feared death because it cut life short. Others said the fear came from uncertainty.
When they compared different religions, she noticed that many traditions, despite their differences, shared a belief in some form of life after death.
Professor Sun suggested another possibility: what earlier thinkers called the “soul” might simply be the activity of the brain.
The discussion did not produce a definitive answer, but it gave her something more valuable: the realization that some questions remain open, and that forming one’s own understanding is part of the process.
Gradually she arrived at her own view: death is a natural physical end, something every living being must face. She recalled Professor Sun’s point that no one knows what happens after death, and that “we should cherish the present moment even more”.
But she remains curious about other interpretations.
That curiosity led her to Xizang in 2024, where she documented sky burial traditions in a short film titled The Faith of Tibet. In the film, she captures prayer flags fluttering in the wind and pilgrims turning prayer wheels, images that reflect the deep spiritual meaning attached to life and death.
“These rituals do not produce food,” she wrote in the film’s narration, “but they create meaning.”
“They connect individual lives to eternity, answering the question of why we live.”
Science and ethics
At the same time, her grandfather’s illness pushed her toward science.
She began studying advanced Diploma Programme (DP) courses in biology, chemistry, and mathematics and joined a research program examining the effects of exercise on Alzheimer’s disease.
Working with epidemiological data, she wrote a research paper analyzing how physical activity might influence cognitive decline. She was guided by Professor Garett Griffith at Northwestern University.
The work brought her closer to the scientific side of medicine.
“In the lab,” Jacqueline said, “I began to see that research and medicine both rely on the same logic: translating theory into practical solutions, and knowledge into cures.”
Yet, philosophy never disappeared from her thinking.
She is deciding between two admission offers: a medical program at the University of Hong Kong, and philosophy and biology programs at Johns Hopkins University.
For her, the two paths are not contradictory.
Philosophy, she believes, helps guide the direction of science. As technologies such as artificial intelligence, gene editing, and brain-computer interfaces advance, society will increasingly face ethical questions that science alone cannot answer.
Her hope is to explore both worlds, asking not only what science can do, but what it should do.
Healing Beyond Medicine: Why Anna Xiang believes mental health needs new solutions
Anna Xiang still remembers the first time she heard about psychologist Harry Harlow’s rhesus monkey experiment.
In this test, done in the 1950s, newborn monkeys were placed in cages with two artificial “mothers”. One was made of wire and provided milk; the other was covered in soft cloth but offered no food.
The monkeys consistently clung to the cloth mother, except when they needed to nurse.
The lesson was simple yet profound: comfort and emotional connection matter as much as physical nourishment.
Anna first heard the story during a summer internship at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shenzhen, where she was assisting with research on neural pathways.
The internship lasted two months. It was her first experience in a professional laboratory.
But by the end, she began to feel discouraged.
“My supervisor has been working on a project for two-and-a-half years, and still no papers have been published," she said.
Scientific research moved slowly, she realized. Even if she waited another two years, the paper would only be a research finding. It would take another 10 or 20 years for the research results to be truly applied to drug development.
For someone eager to see tangible impact, the pace felt frustrating.
Yet, the rhesus monkey experiment sparked a different idea.
What if emotional comfort itself could become a form of intervention?
From idea to invention
Anna had long been aware of mental health challenges, but didn’t have a direct understanding of depression.
Her grandfather, a doctor, had once described children suffering from severe depression: some so weak they needed their parents’ support even to stand.
Later, she noticed similar struggles among classmates and friends facing academic pressure.
Statistics confirmed what she was seeing: anxiety and depression among adolescents and young adults were rising steadily.
Between her seventh and eighth grade, she began imagining a simple tool that might offer comfort, something like the “cloth mother” in Harlow’s experiment.
By tenth grade, during her internship, the idea had become more concrete.
She designed Dr. Cuddle, a dog-shaped interactive plush toy intended to help users regulate anxiety through breathing exercises, aromatherapy, tactile stimulation, and gentle pressure.
Developing the prototype required unexpected skills. She studied toy manufacturing, visited factories in the Chaoshan region, and researched fire-safety standards and patent procedures.
After months of work, the first version of Dr. Cuddle was ready.
She tested it with friends, neighbors, and children at autism schools. In small trials, she monitored heart rate before and after use and found noticeable reductions in stress indicators.
While researching another project in Shanxi, Anna had a little girl try Dr. Cuddle, who immediately told her mother she wanted to buy it.
The project remains in development, and she hopes to further improve it at university by integrating AI-based monitoring that can automatically adjust calming features based on a user’s physiological state.
Medicine and society
Although she once considered studying history instead of medicine, Anna eventually decided to pursue medicine, joking that in her family, the path felt almost like a “curse”.
Anna will study public health at university and plans to continue it at the graduate level.
Yet her understanding of medicine extends beyond hospitals and prescriptions.
Mental health, she believes, is deeply shaped by social environments: family, school, and cultural expectations.
Medication alone cannot solve the problem.
She often compares the current mental-health crisis to historical epidemics such as the Black Death—a moment that forces societies to reflect on their priorities and values.
“I hope to promote a ‘social revival,’ awakening us to find the power to drive social change within the crisis.”
Her goal is not only to treat illness, but also to help create social conditions that support well-being.
Seeing Science Differently: How Grace Yu opens STEM to visually impaired students
One evening in a movie theater, Grace Yu quietly described a film scene to a group of visually impaired listeners.
“A pale yellow filter spreads across the screen,” she whispered. “Leying runs forward, crying, and the road behind her turns the same color.”
The film was Hi, Mom. Grace and five classmates had prepared a detailed narration script so that audience members with visual impairments could follow the story.
They rehearsed for weeks.
When the film ended, the audience was surprised to learn that the narrators were high-school students.
For Grace, it was one of many experiences working with visually impaired communities through KAP.
A new perspective
Her involvement began in seventh grade, when she joined the Light & Love KAP, teaching children at Guang’ai School. Two years later, she joined another KAP initiative focused on visually impaired students.
At first, she was simply curious. She asked questions about how people born blind imagined colors or visual experiences.
“Can you see things in your dreams?”
“What do people born blind imagine colors to be like?”
Over time, she met more than a hundred visually impaired individuals and discovered how active and creative their lives could be.
In their understanding, for example, colors are linked to feelings or emotions: green is the vibrant color of many plants, and hearing its name evokes a sense of beauty.
Meanwhile, other students played soccer with the visually impaired, using a ball with bells inside, allowing them to determine its position by sound.
Grace also learned about visually impaired artists holding exhibitions, musicians studying professionally, programmers writing code. These experiences shattered her earlier assumptions: people who cannot see do not live in darkness; they live rich and active lives.
One conversation in 2023 changed her thinking completely.
A visually impaired mathematics graduate student named Ang Ziyu, who created her own Braille mathematical symbol system to face the difficulty of recognizing specialized symbols, asked her a simple question: “Does scientific research really require sight?”
The question lingered.
In modern laboratories, much experimental work is automated. Computers analyze data. Machines conduct repetitive procedures.
“When we study protein structure, we use the gene sequence to solve specific problems,” Grace said. “Machines can read experimental data. In this case, humans should be doing more creative work, designing more innovative experiments, and interpreting more possibilities from the results.”
Perhaps, Grace thought, visually impaired researchers could contribute in ways that rely more on interpretation and creativity than visual observation.
Building access
Determined to make science more accessible, she began developing an online learning platform for visually impaired secondary-school students interested in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).
With help from classmates, she designed teaching materials using everyday objects—buttons, yarn, bottle caps—to create tactile models explaining concepts in mathematics, chemistry, and biology.
They also produced instructional videos so families could build the materials themselves.
The platform even includes adapted musical notation for visually impaired learners interested in music.
Grace invited a visually impaired programmer named Xiaoxi to help build the website, ensuring that the platform reflected the real needs of its users.
After nearly a year of work, the site was launched.
“I want others to experience what I love, just in case they’re interested too,” Grace said of her wish to involve her visually impaired friends in the scientific research she loved.
Science through touch
Her most memorable experiment came during an internship at a seed company.
There she realized that identifying crop varieties often relied on tactile cues: the texture of kernels, the shape of leaves.
She organized a visit for twenty visually impaired participants to try the process themselves.
They felt the kernels of corn, rubbed the husks between their fingers, and compared subtle differences in shape and texture.
To her surprise, many quickly developed impressive accuracy. They could “feel” the seeds’ quality, and even identify their varieties.
Watching their excitement, Grace realized that scientific discovery did not always depend on sight. Sometimes, curiosity and sensitivity were enough.
Their happiness, perhaps because it was the first time they understood what “scientific research” was, brought her immense joy and fulfillment.
Expanding “us”
Grace originally planned to study sociology, but her experiences, including leading Keystone’s Cultural Mosaic and the Keystone Model United Nations, gradually led her toward public health and biology.
She wants to expand the definition of “us” to ensure marginalized communities are included in education, research, and social development.
Grace aims for a public health degree. After graduation, she hopes to continue combining biological knowledge with social advocacy to help more people gain access to opportunities in science.
After class one day, Grace casually showed her biology teacher a presentation about the teaching tools she had designed for visually impaired students.
The teacher immediately began offering suggestions.
Moments like this, the students say, are common at Keystone.
Yvonne describes her twelve years at the school with a single word: support. No matter what idea she pursued, there were always people willing to listen and help.
For Jacqueline, arriving from Hong Kong meant discovering a community of students who shared her curiosity about philosophy and science. “After coming to Keystone, my loneliness gradually disappeared. There are so many things waiting for me to try.”
Anna found the freedom to pursue unconventional projects—even building a prototype mental-health device while still in high school.
At Keystone, students often hear not “that’s impossible,” but “let’s try.” Failure is accepted as part of exploration. Success is celebrated, but curiosity matters more than outcomes.
For these four students, biology became a starting point, a way to ask larger questions about society, ethics, and human potential.
Their paths now diverge: to medicine, research, philosophy, and public health.
But the spirit that shaped them remains the same: a willingness to explore, to question, and to imagine new possibilities for the world around them.
