MEET the author

NeuroFantastic (previously, Neurorexia) is the brain child of Shelly Xuelai Fan (范雪莱), PhD.

Shelly was a writer long before she became a scientist. She began writing her first fantasy novel at the tender age of 13, kept a journal for almost two decades, and was the author of many works of fanfiction that shall not be named.

Shelly discovered her interest in the brain while in undergrad completing a degree in Pharmacy at Peking University in Beijing, China. She later pursued a doctorate in neuroscience at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in beautiful Vancouver, Canada, working on a treatment for neurodegenerative diseases. While completing her PhD studies, she began blogging about new scientific findings that made her giddy, and NeuroFantastic was born in 2011 to satisfy that urge. 

In 2015, the site hit two million views, Shelly graduated and moved to San Francisco to work as a post-doctorate associate on blood-based rejuvenation. Similar to the way her blogging interests naturally gravitate towards exercise and newborn neurons in the adult brain, her research also focused on those areas. At the same time, she began working with the Singularity Hub team as a contributing editor in neuroscience. As the official publication of Singularity University, a startup incubator based in silicon valley, the Hub offered her a chance to expand her writing beats into neurotechnology, brain-machine interfaces and artificial intelligence.