Icebreaker Speech for Toastmasters Club: “Who Am I?”
by Li Lei in RTP, NC, in June, 2026
Good afternoon, everyone!
Today is my icebreaker speech at ToastWhisper Club here at Syngenta. Since many of you already know me from work, I want to begin with a simple question:
Who do you think I am?
Maybe some of you would say, “Li is an AI scientist.”
Some may say, “She works in computational biology.”
Some may say, “She is always talking about data, genes, models, and pipelines.”
And some of you may say, “She is the new colleague who is still trying to figure out where everything is in this building.”
All of those are true.
But today, I want to tell you a little bit about the person behind the job title.
I was born and raised in Zhaotong, a small city in Yunnan Province in southwest China. Yunnan is famous for its mountains, flowers, ethnic diversity, and beautiful landscapes. Zhaotong is not a big city, but it shaped me deeply. It gave me curiosity, imagination, and maybe also a little bit of stubbornness.
When I was a little girl, I had a very clear dream: I wanted to become a mathematician.
Not because I fully understood what mathematicians did every day. I did not imagine myself standing in front of a blackboard writing equations for the rest of my life. The real reason was simpler — and a little rebellious.
I heard people say, “Girls are not good at math, especially when they get older.”
I remember thinking, “Really? Who decided that?”
So naturally, I wanted to prove them wrong.
At that time, I learned about Emmy Noether, a brilliant German mathematician. She became one of my role models. She lived in a time when women faced many barriers in academia, but her work changed modern mathematics and physics. To me, she represented intelligence, courage, and quiet strength.
So I studied math very seriously. I loved the beauty of numbers and logic. Math felt like a world where every problem had a hidden door, and if you were patient enough, you could find the key.
My math grades were excellent, and I later won a silver medal in a national mathematics competition. For a young girl from a small city, that was a big encouragement. It made me believe that many limits people place on us are not always real. Sometimes they are just walls built by other people’s assumptions.
But math was not my only dream.
I also wanted to become a poet.
That was a very different dream. Math gave me structure. Poetry gave me freedom. Math helped me understand the world through logic. Poetry helped me feel the world through language.
But when I was young, I also heard people say, “Poets are usually not very happy.” Many famous poets had difficult lives. Some were lonely, depressed, or died young.
So I thought, “Well… maybe being a professional poet is a little dangerous.”
I decided poetry could stay with me as a hobby — a private garden in my heart — but maybe not as my profession.
Looking back, I find this funny. As a child, I gave up being a poet because I thought it was emotionally risky. Then I became a scientist — which is also emotionally risky, just in a different way.
In science, experiments fail. Code breaks. Models do not converge. Papers get rejected. Funding is uncertain. And sometimes, after months of analysis, the data simply tells you, “No.”
So maybe scientists and poets are not so different. Both are searching for patterns. Both are trying to express something true. One uses equations and data; the other uses images and words.
Today, I am an AI scientist, a computational biologist, and a population geneticist. That may sound far away from the little girl who wanted to become a mathematician and poet. But I feel those dreams are still inside me.
As an AI scientist, I still use mathematical thinking. I work with models, algorithms, data, and uncertainty. As a computational biologist, I study life through patterns hidden in genomes and biological systems. As a population geneticist, I think about evolution — how life changes over time, how diversity emerges, and how history leaves traces in DNA.
In some way, I did not abandon math. I followed math into biology.
And I did not abandon poetry either. I still love language, stories, and the beauty of expression. That is one reason I joined Toastmasters. I want to become not only a better scientist, but also a better communicator. I want to learn how to tell stories, how to speak clearly, and how to connect ideas with people.
Because in science, having good ideas is important. But being able to communicate those ideas is equally important. A good idea that no one understands is like a beautiful poem locked in a drawer.
So, who am I?
I am a girl from Zhaotong who once dreamed of becoming a mathematician.
I am someone who still carries poetry quietly inside her.
I am a scientist who studies life through data.
I am a colleague, a learner, and now, a Toastmaster beginning a new journey.
And perhaps, like all of us, I am still becoming.
Thank you.
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