My name is Ayaka Matsuno and I am a fourth year international undergraduate student with a major in Chemistry at University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. I graduated from Langara College, Vancouver, Canada with an associated degree in Chemistry in 2019 and transferred to UBC in the same year.
I have chosen to study chemistry, especially organic chemistry. In the course of organic chemistry, I have learned how products are created by adding different compounds, by which, like solving puzzles, I feel a sense of accomplishment and fulfillment. The most interesting part in organic chemistry is that created products can be potential medicinal drugs and save our lives.
I worked as a researcher in Nagoya Institute of Technology in Japan, and my research was about the development of medicine. More than 20% of medicine contains fluorine which is the chemical element denoted as “F.” Compared to other elements, fluorine is contained in a lot of medicine so that researching fluorine is crucial for medicinal drugs in order to enhance the quality of our lives. My team produced compounds containing fluorine and analyzed the activity of the produced compounds. The paper for our work was published in Tetrahedron, 2021, and I held a presentation in a pharmaceutical conference in July 2021 in Japan. Hopefully, these experiences extended my potential for my future.