The story of 扶疏堂研究所｜Herboratory

At the beginning, that summer, finally dealt with the MSc defense and ready to leave that hell department for graduation. After the thesis defense 📖, the supervisor, my boss who rescued me from the MSc degree invited me for lunch. During the meal 🍜, my boss asked me about my plan after graduation. The time of experiencing in the damn hell, hatred and tons of negative thoughts were pushing me to the edge. However, I knew I still wanted to research 🧪; I also wanted to know if my “low-cost_high-benefit” 💰 idea on research would work or not; and I wanted to be like my idol - Severus Snape…so I told to my boss that I wanted to start my own lab. Surprisingly, he encouraged me to do so, which trigger this long journey.

I don’t have specific fields for the lab. There are only 2 rules: must be low-cost-high-benefit, must be nonsense but interesting. Few projects were in the list but I wasn’t capable to start; on the other hand, barriers of living “swollowed” my time and energy that the lab startup was still in my mind.

Due to career planning I started to take another undergraduate degree in Chinese medicine, and I had some time to try a bit of everything. At some stage, the English name of the lab Herboratory popped up, and my another boss in Chinese medicine named the Chinese name of the lab “扶疏堂研究所” - the lab was fianlly named. A while I was interested in herbs and tried to experiment to make some products such as external use and food, but things didn’t go smooth and got many tools and leftover testing products. At the same time, I found that Chinese medicine is not only a therapy technique but also a philosophy, and possible to combine my previous academic background and data science technique.

Although Herboraty is still building in a very slow progress, it has been gaining some experience and built some projects.

Why engineering department?

Herboratory is interested in anything related to nature 🌳 and plant 🪴, also traditional medicine 🧉. Unlike the “spoofy (wasted but ready-to-build again)” Research and Development Department to deal with the physical products and academic studies, engineering department focus on data related and application development. So the main tasks of this department are presenting tutorials and notes for the development, publishing release for the new projects and being grumpy.