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Hi, I'm Cindy!

I am a scientific researcher, creative writer, slam poet, FGLI student, and coffee-lover born and raised in NYC. As of Fall 2023, I am pursuing a Master's Degree in Neuroscience at Taipei Medical University under a U.S. Fulbright Scholarship, researching whole-brain neural network models. In May 2023, I graduated from Yale University with a B.S. in Neuroscience and B.A. in History of Science, Medicine & Public Health. 

Writing has been a huge part of my life for as long as I can remember. I've always been heavily inspired by physician-writers and love exploring the intersections between scientific and creative writing, as well as spoken word poetry. 

My work has been featured in the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, Foyle Young Poet Awards, Bitter Melon Magazine, Argus Magazine, Yale Daily News Magazine, Yale Literary Magazine, and Yale Scientific Magazine. Throughout the years, I have learned a lot from taking on leadership roles such as Editor-in-Chief of Argus Literary Magazine and senior managing editor of Yale Scientific Magazine, and have had wonderful opportunities to perform spoken word myself for a variety of audiences.

My Latest Work

Yale Daily News •

Sonnet

Yesterday, I found a dead sparrow with

no legs, stump body left on Whitney street.

Dirt-dry bird casting radius of filth:

side-steps, side-eyes, meat hung neatly in heat.

Summer maggots in the eye—rotting breast,

larvae in the chest. The pitter-patter,

soft twittering of hatchlings in the nest,

quiets into closed eyes. Devastations.

A realization, a mother’s last breath.

Gilded wings by goldsmith hands, a weeping,

belly-up, bent, beaten, sun-boiled life—

Still. How lightly

A Personalized Fingerprint for Attention – Yale Scientific Magazine

In a world where our attention is pulled every which way by strategic advertisements and technicolor screens, our attention may be our most valuable commodity. Our brains have limited cognitive capacity, and it would be impossible to attend to every visual or sensory stimulus we encounter in our daily lives. This means our brains have developed an elaborate system to selectively process the information most relevant to us at any given time.

But how do we even measure attention? To date, attenti
Yale Daily News •

POETRY: Afong Moy Teaches Provenance

when the poacher knocks on my door, arms

crossed with collections, I do not hear

his tranquilizers hit the window panes, I am high

when he pierces the glass with shouts, tracks

mud on my floors, I fork my tongue

to guide him to the precious porcelain,

while he slits formal words with his breath

I dare him to claim as much as he can,

as I rock back and forth

in epileptic flashes, show him how to

hide from thick Japanese boots, how to

while your sisters are being touched a few feet away
Yale Scientific Magazine •

Expected Parenthood: Fathers vs. Mothers – Yale Scientific Magazine

Image courtesy of the New York Times.

Pregnancy is widely understood to be a time of neurophysiological and psychological change for the mother in preparation for caregiving—but what about for the expectant father? A recent study led by Helena Rutherford at the Yale Child Study Center compared maternal and paternal responsiveness to infant affective facial cues, seeking possible correlations between neural and psychological changes in the transition to parenthood.

Sixty-eight expectant parents
Yale Daily News •

POETRY: At Meng Po’s Bridge of Rebirth

can you promise me now

when you see me at the bridge,

you won’t say you’re proud

and I won’t say I’m sorry:

Lady Meng Po’s cloak will guide

the steam of her soup, stationed well,

with hands ready to serve,

greeting passengers, holding out full bowls

to the dead girls, the first sip is sweet,

the second is regret as she meets her mother’s gaze,

third is spillover debt, as heavy hearts still

across the bridge,

we’ll wait

until warm amnesia soup slides into our bellies,

to
Yale Scientific Magazine •

The New Social Robot: Deep Learning with DANTE for automatic group detection – Yale Scientific Magazine

Imagine you’re at First Year Formal. You’re talking in a circle, and your belly is full of the mini hot dogs. When the room gets crowded, your friends instinctively shuffle closer together to form a smaller circle, without even a hitch in the conversation.

Not that exciting, right? But upon deeper thought, that non-verbal group movement and maintenance of a shared focus of attention during a conversation are crucial aspects of human social awareness—aspects that robots have yet to master. In ro

Foyle Young Poets of the Year Commended Poets Anthology 2018

We are delighted to announce the winners of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award 2018. From nearly 6,000 poets and 11,000 poems, the top 15 and 85 commended poets have now been selected and we can’t wait to celebrate them in the weeks, months and years to come.

Judges Daljit Nagra and Caroline Bird (herself a former winner) had a tough job picking the top 100 from such a range of poems. Caroline Bird has said, “The poems that embedded themselves in my mind were those with a strong, original
Yale Scientific Magazine •

Earth’s Evolution through Eons: Using the history of argon as a constraint of continental evolution

How can we study crustal development?

Scientists have long sought to understand the development of the Earth—in particular, what exactly has allowed it to transform into the only known life-harboring planet? Yale graduate student Meng Guo and her advisor Jun Korenaga have aimed to build a piece of this complex puzzle in a recent publication in Science Advances. In the paper, Guo looks into understanding the development of Earth’s crust through a process known as argon degassing.

The developmen

For more writing, check out my author profiles:

Yale Scientific Magazine: https://www.yalescientific.org/author/cindy-kuang/

Yale Daily News Magazine: https://yaledailynews.com/blog/author/cindykuang/

Photography

Contact Me

Please reach out if you would like to talk more, I'd love to hear from you!

Email: cindy.ck516@gmail.com