JUSTL participant: Ms Clare Hau In Lun
Ms Clare Hau In Lun is a Visiting Scholar in Prof Stanley Lau’s laboratory in the Department of Ocean Science at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She completed her MPhil (Marine Environmental Science) in 2016, again in Prof Lau’s laboratory. For her MPhil project, she investigated the population dynamics and community structure of bacteria as they undergo habitat transition from an animal host to a subtropical marine sediment. At the same time as conducting her MPhil research, Ms Lun worked for the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department as a Fisheries Management Officer; she was involved in licensing, enforcement and liaison issues related to the fisheries industry in Hong Kong. Ms Lun told me that, “This position gave me the opportunity to connect and communicate with some local fishermen and mariculturists, as well as fisheries experts, so I gained a lot of experience in this job.”
Current work
Ms Lun has been a Visiting Scholar in Prof Lau’s laboratory since 2017. Her current work is related to her MPhil research project, and she is involved in microbial source tracking fecal pollution in the marine environment. In the near future, she will also be involved in a new project, in which she will be investigating microbes in the fisheries environment. She will investigate various aspects of the local fisheries industry using a variety of microbiology and molecular biology techniques.
JUSTL Programme
Ms Lun was a participant in the 2011 JUSTL programme. She was mentored in part by Prof Stanley Lau who also attended the JUSTL programme as a senior participant, and in part by Dr Scott Lindell (Marine Resources Center, MBL). Ms Lun worked on a project to compare the genetic diversity of Escherichia coli bacteria in two locations in Woods Hole, Eel Pond and Stoney Beach. E. coli is a sub-group of coliform bacteria as they are present in the digestive system of animals and therefore are also found in their excreta. The presence of such fecal bacteria is therefore generally used when monitoring the amount of fecal pollution in water resources, including shellfish harvest sites. Ms Lun measured the abundance of this bacterium over the 8-week period that she was in Woods Hole, and compared the genetic diversity of the bacteria collected from Eel Pond (more heavily contaminated) and Stoney Beach (a more pristine environment). She also studied the abundance of bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria and thus can transmit DNA between species, at these two sites.
In addition to her research project, Ms Lun attended the lectures of the Microbial Diversity course. In their joint end-of-programme report, Prof Lau and Ms Lun said, “These lectures have given Clare some ideas about her research in Hong Kong, and Stanley some inspirations in his teaching methods.” Ms Lun especially remembers one of the Friday evening lectures, where the speaker described the prediction of salmon production through investigating the oil content in copepods, which are small crustaceans found in almost all aquatic habitats. Ms Lun found this lecture very interesting, and indeed it inspired her to learn more about the fisheries field for her career.
Ms Lun told me that she really enjoyed her experience on the JUSTL programme: “It was awesome because it allowed me to explore various different fields in biology related to the marine environment.”