Shao-Jie (Nils) is a PhD candidate at ANU’s Centre for Public Awareness of Science (CPAS), focusing on how science and popular culture—through films, manga, and TV series—can mutually enchant each other. Before his journey at CPAS, he was a behavioural neuroscientist who focused on the neural mechanisms of social behaviour, autism, and procrastination.

Alongside his academic work, he is:

1. Producing a Taiwanese Hokkien (台語) podcast that introduces the history of science and technology in Taiwan, combining local dialects with public history to foster both cultural and scientific literacy.
2. Designing a story-based game that explores a Taiwanese high school student’s emotional struggle to choose between science and the humanities—an interactive narrative that reflects on identity, education, and cultural expectation in contemporary Taiwan.

Across all his work, he aims to bridge the lab, society, and the arts, using science to hatch fictions.

Projects:

Debugged: Parasitology in Popular Culture, Principal investigator