Grace Dai is a junior studying Computational Biology and minoring in Data Science. She grew up in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where her teachers and neighborhood fostered her love for nature and interest in food security, health sciences, music, and art. Before Penn, she took a gap year, where she worked with Grow Ohio Valley as an Americorps staffer and conducted research at a biotech startup in Hawai'i. She is extremely excited and grateful for the opportunity to travel to Australia through PGS and learn more about how the arts are utilized in indigenous communities and holistic healthcare worldwide.
At Penn, she founded the Alternative Protein Project, leads the Impact First Ventures team, and conducts metagenomics research at the Agricultural Systems and Microbial Genomics Lab. She also loves making jewelry, fermenting foods, and hiking in her free time!
During her upcoming semester, she's particularly looking forward to...
- Visiting waterfalls at Kakadu and Litchfield National Park
- Learning from indigenous authors and creators from Australia and South Africa
- Sharing new tea and sweets with new friends/classmates, all from different backgrounds at Penn
- Discovering cool plant species at the Sydney Botanical Gardens
