Patrick Hau is a PhD student in molecular microbiology within the Department of Health Technology and Informatics at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Co-supervised by Dr Franklin Chow and Professor Gilman Siu, his research focuses on cross-kingdom RNA interference (ckRNAi) mechanisms during host–pathogen interactions, utilising advanced sequencing techniques like CLEAR-CLIP. Moving forward, he is expanding his work to investigate viral–human ckRNAi systems alongside the evolutionary dynamics of viral small RNAs. By participating in the Croucher Summer Course, Patrick aims to bridge his background in molecular genomics with population-level viral evolution and epidemiology.