Shanlin Tong (ESR11)

Shanlin was born and raised in Beijing and moved to Sweden at the age of 14. He has both BSc and MSc degrees in biomedicine from the prestigious Karolinska Institutet. In 2018, he was selected to exchange to Osaka University with a JASSO scholarship to investigate the effect on T cells induced by novel immunotherapy at Prof. Kumanogoh’s lab. His strong interest in scientific research and a history of getting results were recognized by winning several international and domestic prizes, such as iGEM 2017 Gold Medal at MIT, The Best Poster Performance Award at ISCOMS congress, and Third Prize of the China-Sweden Innovation Venture Contest.
In 2019, he continued to pursue his medical doctor dream at the University of Groningen. At medical school, he also developed a computational algorithm to tackle the challenge of batch effects in survival and genetic analysis for cancer studies. During his clinical internships at oncology and COVID ICU wards, the limited therapeutic options for his severely ill patients motivated him to develop a career by combining medical care with translational research. After finishing his pre-clinical education, he was awarded the highly competitive Marie Curie Fellowship to continue his Ph.D. research in PI3K mutations in cancer, under the supervision of Prof. Okkenhaug at the University of Cambridge.
In 2022, he will join the PIPGEN network with the other 14 candidates. Ultimately, he wishes to apply his research, clinical and entrepreneurial knowledge from the network to serve as a bridge between the bench and bedside for future breakthrough discoveries in medicine.