Asian American/Pacific Islander Heritage Month
Amit Patel
Cardiac surgeon
Patel is an Indian American cardiac surgeon and Director of Clinical Regenerative Medicine and Tissue Engineering at the University of Utah. He studied medicine at the Case Western Reserve University. In 2002, he led a "breakthrough" study demonstrating that stem cell transplantation could treat congestive heart failure.
Asian American/Pacific Islander Heritage Month
Xuong Nguyen-Huu
1933-
Electrical engineer, mathematician, physicist
The Vietnamese born Nguyen-Huu holds degrees in electrical engineering, mathematics and physics. He is a pioneer of protein crystallography technology. Since 1975, his "Xuong's X-Ray Machine" has helped researchers make three-dimensional images, allowed for high-speed data collection, and has aided in research of drugs to kill deadly viruses such as HIV and Polio.
Asian American/Pacific Islander Heritage Month
Tuan Vo-Dinh
1948-
Biomedical Engineer, chemist
Born in Vietnam, he came to the United States in 1975. He has a doctorate degree in biophysical chemistry from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. He is currently a professor of Biomedical Engineering, Professor of Chemistry, and Director of the Fitzpatrick Institute for Photonics of Duke University. Vo-Dinh specializes in photonics, the science of the interaction between light and matter.
Asian American/Pacific Islander Heritage Month
Sam Wang
Neuroscientist
Wang was raised in California by Taiwanese parents. He has a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology and Ph.D. in neuroscience from at Stanford University. He has co-written two books, and published over fifty articles on the brain in leading scientific journals. He lectures on a regular basis and has been featured in several leading newspapers, and radio and television networks.
Asian American/Pacific Islander Heritage Month
Maria P. P. Root
1968-
Clinical psychologist
The Philippine-born psychologist, educator, and public speaker based in Seattle, is an expert on multiracial families, multiracial identity, cultural competence, trauma, work place harassment, and disordered eating. The U.S. Census referred to her books in the deliberations that resulted in a "check one or more races" format to the race question for the 2000 census.
Asian American/Pacific Islander Heritage Month
Sangeeta N. Bhatia
1968-
Biological Engineer
The Indian American biological engineer and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology does research on applications of micro- and nano-technology for tissue repair and regeneration. In 2003, she was named to the MIT Technology Review TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35.
Asian American/Pacific Islander Heritage Month
Abul Hussam
Chemist
Originally from Bangladesh, Hussam moved to the United States in 1978 for graduate studies. He earned a doctorate in analytical chemistry and became a U.S. citizen. He invented the Sono arsenic filter to fight arsenic contamination of groundwater in Eastern India and Bangladesh. He currently teaches chemistry Professor at George Mason University in Virginia.
Asian American/Pacific Islander Heritage Month
Mohammad Ataul Karim
Scientist
He is Bangladeshi American scientist and Vice President for Research of Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. He is trained as a physicist and an electrical engineer with expertise in electro-optical devices and systems, optical computing, image processing, and pattern recognition. To date, over 2600 publications world-wide have made reference to his scholarly findings.
Asian American/Pacific Islander Heritage Month
Anita Goel
Physicist-Physician
A Harvard-MIT-trained Physicist-Physician, she is a globally recognized leader in the emerging field of nanobiophysics—a new science at the convergence of physics, nanotechnology, and biomedicine. She founded Nanobiosym to integrate these three fields to reveal new scientific solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges.
Asian American/Pacific Islander Heritage Month
Balamurali Ambati
1977-
Ophthalmologist, educator, and researcher
Ambati is a Tamil-American ophthalmologist, educator, and researcher, currently working at the University of Utah. At 17, he became the world’s youngest doctor in 1995. He has developed strategies to reverse corneal angiogenesis and conducted research in outcomes of corneal and refractive surgery.
Asian American/Pacific Islander Heritage Month
Yellapragada Subbarao
1895-1948
Biochemist
Subbarao was an Indian biochemist who discovered the function of adenosine triphosphate as an energy source in the cell, and developed methotrexate for the treatment of cancer. Most of his career was spent in the United States and despite the fact that he was a relative unknown scientist to the public he led some of America's most important medical research during World War II.
Asian American/Pacific Islander Heritage Month
Flossie Wong-Staal
1947-
Scientist
In the early 80s Wong-Staal, a Chinese-American virologist and molecular biologist, was the first scientist to clone HIV and determine the function of its genes, a major step in proving that HIV is the cause of AIDS. In the 1990s, Wong-Staal's research focused on gene therapy, using a ribozyme "molecular knife" to repress HIV in stem cells. In 2007, The Daily Telegraph heralded Dr. Wong-Staal as #32 of the "Top 100 Living Geniuses.”
Asian American/Pacific Islander Heritage Month
Howard K. Koh
1952-
Assistant Secretary for Health
As the Assistant Secretary for Health, Dr. Koh oversees the HHS Office of Public Health and Science (OPHS), the Commissioned Corps of the Public Health Service, and the Office of the Surgeon General. He is also a senior public health advisor to the Secretary. At OPHS he leads programs relating to disease prevention, health promotion, reduction of health disparities, women's and minority health, HIV/AIDS, vaccine programs, physical fitness and sports, bioethics, population affairs, blood supply, research integrity and human research protections.
Asian American/Pacific Islander Heritage Month
Yoky Matsuoka
1972-
Research pioneer in science and engineering
Born in Japan and raised in California, Matsuoka turned to robotics when sports injuries sidelined her dream of becoming a professional tennis player. With a career spanning academia and work in engineering, today she is a pioneer researcher who combines neuroscience and robotics in the quest to create human thought-controlled prosthetics that look and perform like natural limbs. For her visionary work, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-trained Matsuoka, who is also mother of four, was awarded the MacArthur Foundation's "genius" award in 2007.
Asian American/Pacific Islander Heritage Month
Jim Yong Kim
1959-
President-elect of the World Bank
On April 16, 2012, the World Bank officially elected Jim Yong Kim as its next President-elect. Earlier, the Korea-born Kim, who had immigrated to the United States as a young boy, had served as the President of Dartmouth College. With extensive experience in international development, working in senior advisory positions for the World Bank and as the co-founder and executive director of Partners in Health, he is credited with spearheading successful programs to implement and deliver health interventions in poor communities around the world.
Asian American/Pacific Islander Heritage Month
Cho Hao Li
1913-1987
Biochemist
The Chinese-born and educated Li immigrated to the United States in 1935 where he studied at the University of California at Berkeley, eventually becoming a professor at the school in 1950. He spent his academic career studying the pituitary-gland hormones and, in 1966, demonstrated how the human pituitary growth hormone, somatotropin, consisted of a chain of 256 amino acids. He went on to successfully synthesize the hormone in 1970, which at the time was the largest protein molecule ever synthesized.
Asian American/Pacific Islander Heritage Month
Susumu Ohno
1928- 2000
Geneticist, evolutionary biologist, and molecular evolution researcher
Born of Japanese parents in Korea, he earned a Ph.D. in veterinary science at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology in 1949, and later a Ph.D. and D.Sc. from Hokkaido University. In 1952 he joined City of Hope Medical Center in California. He postulated that gene duplication plays a role in evolution. In 1956 he discovered that the Barr body of mammalian female nuclei was a condensed X chromosome.
Asian American/Pacific Islander Heritage Month
Dr. David D. Ho
1952-
Scientist, Research Pioneer
Born in Taiwan, Ho immigrated to America with his family as a child. Years later he was a resident in internal medicine at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center when he came into contact with some of the first reported cases of what would later be known as AIDS. Since then, Ho has been at the forefront of AIDS research, developing highly active anti-retroviral therapy. He has authored more than 400 scientific papers. Ho's research team is now working on developing vaccines for AIDS.
Asian American/Pacific Islander Heritage Month
Dr. Min Chueh Chang
1908-1991
Reproductive Biologist
Chang was a Chinese-born biologist who specialized in the area of reproduction and human fertilization. His research on in vitro fertilization led to the first test tube baby. He is also credited as the co-inventor of the combined oral contraceptive pill. He received a doctoral degree in animal breeding from Cambridge University in 1961 before working with co-inventor Dr. Gregory Pincus. Chang's research spanned 45 years.
Asian American/Pacific Islander Heritage Month
Gordon H. Sato
1927-
Cell biologist
Sato was born in Los Angeles and is the son of a Japanese-born immigrant father and a first generation U.S.-born Japanese mother. He is an American cell biologist who discovered that polypeptide factors required for the culture of mammalian cells outside the body are also important regulators of differentiated cell functions and of utility in culture of new types of cells for use in research and biotechnology. For this work he was elected in 1984 to the United States National Academy of Sciences
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