P.D. Soros Fellowship for New Americans

XIAO PENG is currently an assistant professor of genetic medicine and the director of the Genetics of Blood and Immunity Clinic at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where she recently completed a combined residency in Pediatrics and Medical Genetics. During residency, she spearheaded the effort to bring more patients with suspected inborn errors of immunity to molecular diagnosis, co-authored 2 book chapters and several papers, and continued to spread her love of wine and viticulture. She has worked as beverage director for the Peter Chang restaurant group and currently owns a wine import and distribution company in Maryland, with the goal of continuing to make a diversity of thoughtful, artisanal wines accessible to consumers. In addition to her clinical focus on inborn errors of immunity, she continues to dedicate significant time to genetics teaching and outreach for medical providers at various levels. She is excited to be returning to the bench to do more developmental gene regulation research in the near future - and to get back to her beloved vineyards.

Xiao came to America at five years of age to join her parents, who were among the first Chinese graduate students awarded visiting scholarships. Having been sent-down to work in the fields during the Cultural Revolution, her parents were self-educated from a young age. Their intellectual curiosity, selflessness and perseverance in the face of adversity continues to inspire Xiao with the same self-motivated enthusiasm for learning and the desire to empower others less fortunate.

Xiao graduated in 2005 with honors in chemistry from Caltech and subsequently worked as a research technician at the Broad Institute of Harvard/MIT. She graduated with an MD-PhD from Weill Cornell/Rockefeller/Memorial Sloan-Kettering Tri-Institutional MD-PhD Program in 2017.

(And recently, she has been lucky enough to work with and befriend another Soros Fellow, Dr. Carolina Montano, who is an NIH Genetics Fellow)