Vivian Chen

Vivian Chen Wong was a graduate student co-advised by Gavin Sherlock and Dmitri Petrov (2019-2022). She studied how mutations well adapted to one environment fare in new environments. Her work focused on how ploidy influences the adaptive mutational spectrum and how zygosity of a mutation impacts an organism’s fitness in new environments.

Vivian received her BS in Molecular Cell and Developmental Biology from UCLA, where she worked with Utpal Banerjee studying how wound healing dictates hematopoeisis using Drosophila melanogaster. She also worked at UCSF with Peter Walter, studying protein regulation and the unfolded protein response (UPR) using Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

Vivian is now working at Perplexity training AI models to improve factual accuracy of generated content related to Biology and Genetics.