![]() She also began writing popular songs at age 10, and two songs she wrote while a student at Saratoga High School later showed up on her debut album, Waking Hour. ![]() Teng was a talented pianist, and for a while she dreamed of a concert career. Her parents "didn't force it on me at all, and they never scolded me into practicing," she told Marian Liu of the San Jose Mercury News. ![]() Many Chinese-American parents in California require piano studies of their children, but Teng asked for them on her own after trying out pianos at the houses of family friends. Piano lessons also helped push Teng in the direction of a musical career. "It was a tradition that was taken with the poetry of words and with the idea that lyrics should say something." "It was sophisticated stuff-'You read your Emily Dickinson and I, my Robert Frost,'-that's not simple English," Teng recalled to Joel Selvin of the San Francisco Chronicle. She got some early exposure to the art of the singer-songwriter when her parents started listening to records by Carole King, James Taylor, and Simon & Garfunkel in order to improve their English skills. Teng's parents, natives of Taiwan, came to California to work in the San Francisco Bay Area's technology industry. Vienna Teng is her stage name, taken at age 12 to honor the Austrian city that was home to classical composers Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms her birth name was Cynthia Shih. Teng was born in 1978 in San Jose, California. She has released two albums on the Seattle-based Virt label and has appeared on CNN, The Late Show with David Letterman, and National Public Radio's Weekend Edition. After her graduation from Stanford University, she caught the public's attention with her graceful, intricately accompanied original songs. Teng studied classical piano from age five until she finished high school. My questions continue to evolve, but they always stem from the same big-picture curiosity about how individuals “click” through different states in which they react to the world in dramatically different ways within a single life-span and often within a single day… which I've wondered about ever since I was a little kid trying to figure out the behaviors of the adults around me.California-born singer-songwriter-pianist Vienna Teng has drawn numerous comparisons from journalists attempting to characterize her style-comparisons not only to other female singer-songwriters like Sarah McLachlan and Tori Amos, but also to classical composer Fréderic Chopin. Gro Amdam’s lab at Arizona State University.ĭuring my PhD, I worked in the field of honey bee neurethology to understand how differences in neurochemistry and behavior arise from honey bees’ foraging experiences. With Sarah’s encouragement, after undergrad I started a PhD in Dr. Pierce’s support and strong mentorship, and for the truly incredible sandwiches Sarah got me after long days looking for shiny green bees in places ranging from Harvard Square to seaside villages in France. The Pierce lab showed me how to zoom waaay out to witness how brains and behaviors have been shaped through grand time scales by changing environments and inter-species interactions. Nathan Donelson, had deepened my grasp of intricate neuromodulation, circuitry, and genetics on the scale of individual brains. My previous internships in the Birren and Griffith labs at Brandeis, and particularly the guidance of Dr. ![]() Sarah brought me to places in the Boston area that I’d been to a million times before and taught me to find animals and behaviors I’d never imagined existing, like tiny chimneys of packed soil poking out from the ground to prevent water from flooding bees’ nests. We used a species of sweat bee that exhibits polymorphic sociality (sometimes social, sometimes solitary) to tackle questions about the evolution of social behavior. There weren’t any social insect labs at Brandeis, my alma mater, so I started working with Dr. I was hooked in a way that I had never previously experienced the world of social insects felt like a playground. One article led to the next and soon my icebreaker for meeting new people became the process of how worker bees “vote” on whether to make a new baby queen depending on their threshold for circulating queen pheromone. I was working at a pharmaceutical company one summer in college, and came across the term “pheromone.” My interest piqued by the idea of floating chemicals that can have the power to modify everything from animals’ learning abilities to their capacity for reproduction, I looked for more examples and was linked to an article about honey bees.
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