Throughout May, Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we will celebrate individuals in Science, health & healthcare. We will be highlighting a few heroes of ours. Whether they’ve pioneered their industry or changed the way we practice medicine itself, our heroes know no bounds and inspire us to be our best selves.
Margaret Chung, Physician
Margaret Chung comes from a Chinese immigrant family and is the eldest of 11 children. She graduated from the University of Southern California Medical School in 1916, which made her the first American-born Chinese female Doctor. In the early 1920s, Margaret had a hand in establishing a hospital in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the first Western hospital in the area! She led the hospital’s OB/GYN and pediatrics, where she treated the local Chinese American community. Chung also helped pave the way for women’s integration into the U.S armed forces by helping to establish WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Services).
Esther Choo, Physician
Esther Choo is a widely published and current professor of Emergency Medicine at OHSU. Graduating from Oregon Health and Science University with a Masters in Public Health in 2009, she continued her education for an M.D. at the Yale University School of Medicine.
Since completing her degrees, she has earned an Outstanding Physician Award, an honor for the Best Innovation in Emergency Medicine, and an Outstanding Review Award – marking her highly distinguished professional and intellectual abilities.
Miriam Lee, East Asian Medicine Practitioner
We have Miriam Lee to thank for our ability to practice acupuncture here in the United States. A pioneer behind bringing Eastern medicine to the Western world, Miriam left China in 1949 and began practicing acupuncture from her new home in California. Standing against the Western adversity to acupuncture, she faced trials against practicing without a license – but her skills spoke for her. Her patients expressed the talent of her acupuncture sessions in treating them, and within only a few days after the trials, acupuncture was well on its way to being seen as a legitimate practice in the state of California.
Miriam Lee continued spreading the wealth of her knowledge as she became an acupuncture teacher for many practitioners and the founder of the Acupuncture Association of America, which serves to promote acupuncture education, research, and legislative advocacy.
Flossie Wong-Staal, Scientist
Born in Guangzhou, China, Flossie Wong-Staal (originally named Yee Ching Wong) was a leading female researcher in molecular biology. After moving to Hong Kong and later California, the beginnings of her career stemmed from the completion of her Ph.D. at UCLA.
Flossie Wong-Staal paved the way for HIV research. Being the first researcher to clone the HIV retrovirus, she opened the path towards understanding its genetic functionality and its role in causing AIDS. Not only did she provide extensive research on a topic that was little understood at that time, but her name was well known throughout scientific journals. She was the most widely cited female scientist with many publications to her name.
Later in her career, she began the Center for AIDS research and simultaneously co-founded Immusol for Biopharmaceuticals. Ranking amongst the top 50 female scientists by Discover Magazine and #32 in the Top 100 Living Geniuses, Flossie was nothing short of an incredible person in the scientific community.