P.D. Soros Fellowship for New Americans

Gerald's parents, who are ethnically Chinese, emigrated from Myanmar to seek out new opportunities in the United States, and to escape institutionalized racism that barred them from pursuing their dreams. Through their example, Gerald, who was born in Anaheim, California, learned to put others before himself. Fascinated by science from an early age, Gerald began research in high school studying atmospheric chemistry, which culminated in a first author publication in Chemical Physics Letters and third-place in the team portion of the 2005 Siemens Westinghouse Science and Technology Competition. 

As an undergraduate at Harvard College, Gerald performed chemical biology research in the laboratory of Professor David Liu to discover molecules that inhibit cancer pathways. The work was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Seeking to understand how social forces also influence human disease, Gerald spent a year after college in China and Myanmar on a Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Fellowship exploring the impact of culture and politics on HIV/AIDS dynamics. 

The PD Soros Fellowship supported Gerald in his MD/PhD studies at Stanford University in the Department of Genetics in the laboratory of Professor Maria Barna, where he studied RNA-mediated gene regulation in development and disease. He contributed to work published in Developmental Cell, Cell, and Nature Communications.

After completing a year of residency in Pathology at Stanford University, Gerald is now a pediatrics resident at the University of California, San Francisco. He is interested in pursuing a career as a physician-scientist in pediatric hematology-oncology with an emphasis on studying and treating cancers driven by dysregulation of RNA biology.