Chenxi developed a strong passion for Math research in Y2 ever since her enrolment in the Science Mentorship Programme, in which she got the rare opportunity of working under the mentorship of Professor Gan Wee Teck for NUS on a number theory project titled ‘The Arithmetic of Apollonian Circle Packings’. She has always wanted to work on Math that was outside the curriculum, and being able to research a rather niche geometric configuration gave her ample opportunities to do so.

In 2022, Chenxi participated in the Science Research Programme and collaborated with her classmate, and her professors from A*STAR IHPC on a project titled the ‘Development of Complex Street Networks for Urban Landscape’. While the project was heavy in Math intuition, she focused on coding to develop models to simplify the street networks and subsequently evaluated the effectiveness of these models by devising suitable metrics. She presented her research report at the local IRC-SET Conference of 2023, receiving and learning from the feedback of esteemed scientists, and eventually was able to publish her paper in the IRC Journal in SPRINGER.

Furthermore, in 2023, Chenxi took part in an internship at IHPC, A*STAR, and undertook a machine learning project, in which she evaluated traffic using a Tensorflow Image Classification Model against pollution levels and examined its associations. This project was her initiation into the field of Machine Learning, which she has grown to research extensively through taking part in online courses, reading papers on the most recent developments, and familiarising herself with the architecture of famous ML models. As she was required to analyze large amounts of data, her internship at A*STAR also equipped her with the necessary tools needed to generate insights from data, inspiring her to become a prospective Data Analyst.

Her research skills have taught her perseverance in the face of non-linear progress and also allowed her to think out of the box when it comes to solving open research problems. She hopes that the problem-solving and critical thinking skills acquired in her Math research experience will allow her to take on projects of larger scale in the future, eventually being able to solve the problems in society using Math and Science.