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A few years ago, Chrysler automotive company made the Imported From Detroit television commerical, for the Chrysler 200 mid-sized sedan. That car is assembled at the Sterling Heights Chrysler automotive assembly plant, next to the Ford Motor Van Dyke Transmission Plant and the General Dynamics light tank facility. Auto town, Union town: that's the Sterling Heights I was born and raised in during the 70's and 80's, in a house a mile west of the plant gates on Mound Road.






My parents immigrated from China and Taiwan to the United States for graduate school at the University of Detroit. My mother was a research biochemist at what is now Karmanos Cancer research Institute at Detroit Medical Center; my father was an engineer for Chrysler, then General Motors. My brother and I were born and raised here. I went to Schuchard Elementary and Jeannette Junior High, played violin with the (Detroit Metropolian) Michigan Youth Symphony, went to summer camp at Lost Lake, and cheered for the Maize and Blue on autumn Football Saturdays, with my aunt and uncles and cousins in Ann Arbor and Kalamazoo.






In the summer of 1991, General Motors transfered my father to its engineering operations in Asia, and so we got the chance to move to Tokyo, Japan (with a one year interim stay in Rochester, NY) for the next five years. Since my family is Chinese, not Japanese, I didn't speak any Japanese when I first arrived in Japan, and so attended The American School in Japan, from which I graduated in '94. It was an awesome, awesome experience. I did my first hospital volunteer experiences at St. Luke's in Tsukiji and Tokyo Aventist in Ogikubo, frenzied debate team preparations in Shibuya, chased dragonflies as a counselor with Japanese elementary day campers, hiked the slopes Mount Fuji and the sands of Izu, and made many of my oldest friends there.






I returned to the United States for college, as part of the Honors Program in Medical Education at Northwestern University, one of the oldest programs in the nation offering direct advance admission to medical school for high school seniors. While at Northwestern, I was a proud member of the Science and Engineering Residential College (otherwise known as the Geek House), at that time based out of Lindgren House on the North Quads.

We partied at the Museum of Science and Industry, played elaborate engineering practical jokes (including The Dry Ice Incident and The 1812 Primal Scream), played Battletech and AD&D on the basement pool table, and broke onto the roof of the Engineering Building to watch Comet Hale Bopp in all of its glory. It was a marvelous time with many marvelous friends, even if I was dumb enough to cram my four year engineering degree into just nine quarters and basically live a life of perpetual all-nighters. :-)






While most of my HPME classmates went on to Northwestern Med after completing undergraduate, I applied out and was lucky enough to get to go home to the University of Michigan Medical School. Born and raised a proud Michigan Wolverine, I got the chance to join the family tradition - seven of us nine Michigan-born grandchildren of my father's parents attended U. Michigan over almost thirty continuous years, earning four bachelors, a masters, two PhDs and two MDs along the way.

Three years of blow-torch intense pre-med at Northwestern and two years of medical school years were followed by graduate school and the chance to pursue hobbies and have adventures along with my laboratory work. Those lab years during my MSTP were among the happiest of my life - doing awesome science, learning to dance, singing and playing the fiddle in local music groups, road trips and roller coasters and camping out for Royal Shakespeare Company tickets, and many, many wonderful geeky friends.



After graduation, I went on to Wash U. St. Louis for Pediatrics, and then onwards to Johns Hopkins and the National Cancer Institute @ NIH for Pediatric Hematology / Oncology, where I am now. And so the adventures continue. :-)



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