Applicant · 2026–27
I’m a high-school senior in Anhui, China. I study hearing health — in surveys, in a materials lab, and in hospital corridors — and I write and photograph the people I meet along the way.
Fig. 1 A room, listening · 40 Hz–20 kHz
The question started in a school hallway: almost everyone I knew wore earphones for hours a day, and nobody treated it as a health behaviour.
Three years later it has become a 670-person survey analysed with regression and ANOVA, a student organization with 26 members, and a materials project — an electrospun silk-fibroin wrap that makes hearing-aid domes breathable and antimicrobial, with a patent application in preparation.
What holds the work together is method. I like counting things — respondents, microbial strains, patients — and then sitting with people long enough to hear what the counts miss. A regression can show that daily listening time predicts reported discomfort. It cannot tell you how a patient explains, in their own words, what it is like to stop following a conversation.
Outside the lab I write about film and literature, direct for the stage, photograph folk culture in the Dabie Mountains, and play tennis.
Founder & director · 26 members
Forty articles, fifty thousand words, one question: why don’t we take our ears seriously? We publish plain-language hearing-health writing, run workshops in schools, and make PSAs that travelled further than we expected.
Independent researcher
A 670-person survey on earphone habits, discomfort, and device fit, analysed with regression and ANOVA. Presented as a poster at a national otorhinolaryngology conference.
Independent researcher · biomaterials lab
Electrospun a breathable, antimicrobial wrap for hearing-aid domes — silk fibroin and PCL with silver ions — to reduce the heat and irritation that make people stop wearing their aids.
Creator & interviewer · team of five
Followed eight patients aged 6 to 99, and their families, for two years through repeated interviews — trying to describe hearing loss as a family experience rather than an audiological one.
Program creator & teacher
Designed a photography curriculum about self-expression for nine students at a special-education school, curated their work into an exhibition, and cut a six-minute documentary.
Researcher · four-person team
Screened more than a hundred microbial strains to standardize a household fermentation, isolated 13 mucor and lactic-acid cultures, and tuned pH and temperature. A pineapple-enzyme step fixes the texture.
The organization
Hearing Health Organization started in tenth grade as a website and a group chat. It is now a team of 26 writing about noise, earphones, and stigma — and taking that writing into schools.
We publish long-form, plain-language pieces: 40 articles, more than 50,000 words, 500+ readers. We run workshops at six schools, and our two PSAs have reached 31,000 views across 40 cities and three countries. Along the way I interviewed a product manager at iFlytek about how translation earbuds are marketed to teenagers, and surveyed 260 peers on what they actually believe about volume.
Ask me about the surveySilk fibroin and PCL, electrospun, with silver ions. Tested for breathability and antimicrobial activity; patent application in preparation.
670+ respondents. Regression and ANOVA to separate listening time, reported symptoms, and wearing comfort; poster at a national otorhinolaryngology conference.
100+ strains screened, 13 mucor and lactic-acid isolates, pH and temperature optimization, and a pineapple-enzyme step for texture. Patent application in preparation.
The part that does not fit in a spreadsheet.
For two years I have been interviewing hearing-aid patients and their families — eight people between six and ninety-nine — in clinics, waiting rooms, and their homes. The interviews became a report for a public-awareness campaign, and changed how I design the technical work: a device that is uncomfortable is a device that gets left in a drawer.
At a special-education school I taught nine hearing-impaired children to photograph their own lives, then curated their pictures into an exhibition with 500+ visitors and a six-minute documentary.
I have also volunteered at Anhui Provincial Hospital for four years: guiding elderly patients through self-service kiosks, teaching children healthy vocal technique, and running nutrition sessions — including an insulin-education talk and a sugar-awareness display for 100+ kids.
I write about how stories hold memory — 18,000 words of criticism and fanfiction on 14 works, from Romeo and Juliet to Star Trek.
The pieces have been read 40,000+ times, mostly by other writers, which is how I learned to take an argument apart and put it back together in public. I have directed three stage productions, and I photograph folk culture in the Dabie Mountains — work that became a ten-page paper on nostalgia and identity in Curieux Review.
What I am after is the same thing in every form: the moment a person realizes their experience is not private.
Demo clip — replace assets/video/intro.mp4 with your own introduction, and keep it under two minutes.
Contact
I’m applying to universities in the United States for entry in 2027. If you would like to talk about hearing health, fermentation, or the ethics of interviewing children, my inbox is open.
hello@yourdomain.com