Frances Lin: Telling the Human Story Through Science

“People are stories” — this was the theme of my conversation with Frances Lin ’24, a neuroscience and classical civilizations double major, and pre-med student. It was my first time meeting Lin, and I was immediately struck by her conviction. She is incredibly passionate about her work, not only because it is an exciting intellectual challenge, but because she believes it is her calling: “All the experiences I have built up have made me so sure that medicine is where I’m going to be the best version of myself, because it incorporates everything I love: the human story, but also the scientific story.”

Listening to Lin, it’s easy to get lost in awe of her work ethic. The neuroscience major is notoriously demanding, with the most required courses of any major. When you consider Lin’ further commitments — pre-med requirements, a second major, four years of volunteer work with ABC Tutoring, research, and a thesis — it’s hard not to be amazed at how much energy she has for what’s to come.

Her friends and professors all began with this, telling me how Lin is “incredibly hardworking” and “takes academics very seriously.” But they all hurried to add: There’s more than that!

Eugena Chang ’24 most admires Lin’ willingness to help others: “She wants everyone to succeed. She has impeccable handwriting, and would always share her notes and talk through problems.” Throughout their friendship, Chang shared, “We leaned on each other a lot … so I’m very grateful for her.”

Echoing this sentiment, Luis Guzman ’24 said, “What’s more admirable is that she’s really consistent with all facets of her life … with her friends and with her family.” When Lin can’t spend time with someone because she’s already made plans, she asks a mutual friend to check in on them. “She goes out of her way to make sure people are okay, and I think that’s why it’s really fitting for her to be a doctor.”

The Scientific Story

“Coming from an Asian household,” Lin said, medicine was “introduced early on” as a career path. Lin’ parents moved from Guangzhou to San Francisco a few months before she was born, where they have stayed ever since. “It’s one of the best cities out there,” a “very diverse city,” where you can hear a mix of different languages as you walk down the street, including her native Cantonese.

Lin does not do anything unless she fully believes in it. For example, Lin finds it regrettable that for some, medical school requirements become a list to check off. She would find it miserable, she said, and that’s why she makes sure to create opportunities that fulfill her.

So although medicine was always in the ether where Lin grew up, it was not at all a default choice, but a path she’s found to be her passion.

Her interest in lab work was ignited at her magnet public school, Lowell High school, when she took her first biotech class: “It was so hands-on,” she explained. It made her consider medicine more seriously, as a discipline that focuses on “practical applications.”

To try out medical work, Lin volunteered at a hospital clinical laboratory, where she assisted lab technicians in sorting and prioritizing specimens. “I wanted to have a little more of the science that I didn’t get in school,” she explained. She spent many hours there, learning to work in a “completely different dynamic” than being with her peers at school: “It was a big part of my life.”

After high school, many of Lin’ friends went to public California universities. “It was a really hard choice,” but in the end, the liberal arts college experience brought her to Amherst:  “Coming from such a large [high] school, I felt like it’d be really nice to have small classes.”

It took some trial and error before Lin settled on neuroscience. At first, she still imagined herself going into biotech, but soon realized that she wanted to work more directly with people. She considered psychology, but missed learning about the “exact mechanisms that underlie human behavior.” Thus, neuroscience — “Sometimes I say it’s the child of psych and bio.”

The summer after her first year, Lin interned at the UC San Francisco Emotion, Health, and Psychophysiology Laboratory, where she researched the bidirectional relationship between race-based discrimination and sleep health. “It was my first exposure to the connections between mental and physical health,” she said, connections which would cement her interest in neuroscience. “I thought one way people might be more inclined to speak about mental health would be to link it to physical health, because then it becomes more tangible.” She emphasized, “Mental health and physical health is just health.”

That summer was also when her fascination with sleep began: “We all do it, but no one actually knows how sleep happens.” She set out to find out more about our “unconscious day.”

The Research Story

Back at Amherst, Lin decided to cold email professors at UMass so she could do the kind of behavioral neuroscience research she wanted: “I’ve learned that to get to where I want to go, I have to make opportunities for myself.”

She ended up as a research assistant in the Karatsoreos Lab, where they study the role of circadian rhythm in different aspects of physiology, like immune function, metabolism, and — in Lin’ case — sleep. For her thesis project, Lin investigated how endocannabinoid receptors modulate the effect of circadian-disrupted sleep. To do so, she subjected mice to 20-hour days (instead of 24-hour days) and examined whether the disruption changed gene expression in the prefrontal cortex.

“In these three years, if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that you should sleep and that you should sleep at the proper time,” she said.

Has this insight informed her own sleeping habits? Lin dipped her head and admitted, “Unfortunately, no.” She explained the inherent hypocrisy to being a sleep researcher: you have to be awake “at the most inappropriate times” to study sleep.

Lin has had to sacrifice sleep to get her work done. She recalled writing up her thesis with friends at 5 a.m.: “I think we were fully nocturnal at that point. And I was like, it’s so ironic for me to tell people they should sleep at a proper time when we’re not even sleeping.”

Fortunately, though, late-night study sessions seem to make up some of her fondest — and perhaps most chaotic — memories with friends. Jeffrey Ma ’24 was a member of this nocturnal thesis-writing group. “I’m glad I wasn’t the only one suffering, you know? When you suffer as a collective it becomes more bearable,” he joked. “[Lin] was a very integral part of that.”

Jeffrey clarified that while all-nighters were a rare occurrence for himself, “the neuro kids [seem to] do this on the regular, … talking about drinking Monster and staying up all night.”

I regret to say that I did not do extensive research on the bidirectional relationship between majoring in neuroscience and drinking Monster Energy. However, I can report that one of Guzman’s “really fun” memories with Lin (“well, really fun now, not really fun then”) is of walking to a neuroscience final exam after an all-nighter, Monster Energy in hand. “Because of the adrenaline, we were laughing about everything,” he explained. Lin makes a random joke, Guzman sprays his drink in laughter, and they walk into the exam two minutes late, covered in energy drink.

Some study sessions sounded more like sleepovers. Chang described a “huge air mattress” in Lin’ room, where a group of them would “cycle through sleeping and then getting up and studying. It was a whole ecosystem that [Lin] fostered and nurtured.”

Lin herself fondly recalled her six-person Covid pod’s makeshift workstation. They wanted to work together, but their Greenway suite common room had no tables. Their solution: Home Depot storage boxes. “If anyone peered into our suite common room, they’d see six boxes lined up [and] be like, Are you guys leaving?”

So although Lin’ majors, research, and thesis mean that she has spent many, many hours of her college life doing work, much of it was done with friends — “half studying, half losing time talking,” Guzman said with a laugh. That time spent together is what matters most. As Chang put it: “The memories you make with [with your friends] are the ones that last… I remember studying for the exams, I don’t remember the scores.”

The Latin Story

Of course, writing a thesis is more than staying up with friends. Lin reflected that it gave her a deeper appreciation for scientific writing. “It’s so important, wherever you go, to communicate your science to the general public and make it more accessible,” she told me. It also tapped into her love of storytelling: “Whenever we’re running an experiment, we’re creating an artifact, in the sense that it’s evidence that you’re going to use to build a story — much like in classics.”

Lin took a few Latin courses in early high school because a middle school teacher said it would be helpful for learning scientific vocabulary. “I have rarely used it for my science classes,” she clarified, but when she got to Amherst, she decided to pick it back up: “I thought it’d be cool to learn something that I wouldn't get the chance to otherwise.”

What kept Lin going were the texts: Catullus was “refreshing” for his “expressive and direct” poetry. Seneca was her first real encounter with philosophy, with “thinking about thinking.” It didn’t hurt that she got to do class with Professor van den Berg’s dog, Lou, sleeping in her arms.

Lin also particularly enjoyed Roman History, which she had expected to be a straightforward dates-names-places course, but turned out to be an investigation of history through art. Van den Berg joked that his Roman history course is a bit of a “bait and switch.” As Lin’ classics advisor, he also noted that the relatively new classical civilizations major, which has less language courses and is more focused on history and archaeology, was a good choice for Lin’ “broad range of interests.”

“It’s like a puzzle,” Lin said. The temporal remove of ancient history means you are “looking back” at the evidence and “trying to create your own story.”

While explaining the joy of piecing together history, Lin couldn’t help but link it back to medicine: “When patients come in and tell you, ‘My knee is hurting, I have a headache,’ they’re little pieces of clues that you have to put together to tell a story of what might be happening with them.” She continued, “People are stories, and you work with people in medicine.”

The Story Continues

Applying to medical school is a year-long process that begins in late May. In the coming year, Lin will be working as a medical assistant in an outpatient surgical clinic back home while working on her applications.

Lin is excited for sunny weather again, and to see her high school friends. But she will miss the spontaneity of campus life, her walks on the trail, sitting at Book & Plow, impromptu games on the quad, petting baby animals and, most of all, her friends. “This is the only time in your life where you will see your friends this much, and with such convenience,” she told me. She’s particularly fond of her time in Asian Culture House, how she could bump into someone while brushing her teeth and chat about their days. “It just felt like a home," she reminisced.

Currently, Lin hopes to become a surgeon, potentially in neurology. “The brain is the most mysterious organ,” she said. She feels it would be an honor to “spend my life learning more about the brain.”

Her interest in the part of the body that “does the most complicated things” is unsurprising, given her drive. “It’s really — for lack of a better word — cool to see how far you can push yourself and who you can become,” she said. She added that she “never would have imagined” herself studying the sleep patterns of mice, writing scientific papers, or speaking twice (!) on an Asian and Asian American Classical Caucus panel about diversity in the field.

Reflecting on how much she’s grown over the last four years, Lin believes that “continuously seeing how my work is able to translate into something that might benefit others [is what] makes me more confident that I can achieve more in the future.”

For Lin, medical practice and research go hand-in-hand: “It makes so much more sense that you are not only caring for people in the sense of physically meeting with them, and giving them medication or surgery, but also involved in the sciences that will also ultimately help people as well.” She hopes that in the future, she will be able to “spend more of my time with people” in her work, while contributing to the “advancing field” of neurology.

“How fulfilling it can be in medicine, that you have the power to give hope to patients,” Lin said. “Even if you can’t promise a treatment or a full recovery, you can give them hope, and that’s one of the most important gifts you can give to someone when they’re in a really dark time.