In this edition of Who’s who in the Zoo, meet Mengyuan Li, who is part of the Node Code Breakers team.

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Who: Mengyuan Li

Location: King’s College London, UK

Zooniverse project: Node Code Breakers

What is your research about?

My research involves integrative analyses of image and genomic profiling data to investigate metastatic development in lymph nodes.

How do Zooniverse volunteers contribute to your research?

Zooniverse volunteers generated an amazing number of high-quality segmentations which we are working on to train models to assist our pathologists when locating the immune features we’re interested in.

What’s a surprising or fun fact about your research field?

More and more researchers are taking notice of these immune features, especially germinal centres in the lymph nodes.

What first got you interested in research?

The feeling when I solved or explained something with my own research makes me feel good.

What’s something people might not expect about your job or daily routine?

People never expect that there are researchers who don’t go to the lab, but instead sit in front of computers for the entire working day.

Outside of work, what do you enjoy doing?

Finding some interesting things to do and interesting places to go near to London at weekends. Buying beautiful dresses and doing research on makeup when I am on vacation. Video games, manga, cosplay and planning my next trip to Japan, when I have spare time!

What are you favourite citizen science projects?

HMS NHS: The Nautical Health Service

What guidance would you give to other researchers considering creating a citizen research project?

Try to think from the volunteers perspective; what will interest them? It is very helpful to discuss your project with non-experts to improve your project design and the wording for a more general audience.

Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?

Scientific research is fun, there are always some interesting shapes or patterns to be discovered!