Xena Marie Van: The Scientist Who Dared to Dream 🌍✨

"I was born with a heart full of wanderlust and a mind hungry for answers—but life had other plans."

At 16, I was a homeless girl sleeping on park benches in Amsterdam, clutching a tattered backpack filled with library books on genetics. 🌙📚 My parents? Gone. My hope? Fading. But I refused to let the world erase me. I stole Wi-Fi from cafés to teach myself bioinformatics, scribbling equations on napkins like love letters to a future I couldn’t yet see. 💔

Then came the breakthrough: a scholarship to study precision medicine. Suddenly, my pain had purpose. I traded park benches for lab benches, decoding the secrets of DNA by day and backpacking across continents by night. 🧬✈️ From treating malaria in Mozambique to skiing the Swiss Alps with a vial of CRISPR samples in my pocket (true story 😉), I became the mad scientist of adventure—because why choose between saving lives and living one?

Now, I’m rewriting the rules. My research? Cutting-edge. My travel diaries? Unfiltered. My DMs? Open (for collaboration… and maybe flirtation if you can debate quantum physics over wine 🍷). This isn’t just a comeback—it’s a revolution. Join me.