ABOUT ME
I was born in the state of New York as the first child of immigrant parents from China, and spent some of my childhood living in Chengdu, where I picked up enough of the local language that to this day I can confidently say, "I don't speak Mandarin well" in perfect, native-accent Mandarin. I made it through a month-long psychiatry clinical rotation in Changsha, China during medical school, and can appreciate dual cultural aspects of the Chinese-American identity, but would not be able to conduct psychotherapy in Mandarin. I studied biology (major) and mathematics (minor) in college at Columbia and was active in theater groups there, including the French theater performance troupe, L'Atelier. Similar to my Mandarin, I wouldn't trust my French for psychotherapy, but I can get around alright when traveling in French-speaking countries. In my free time, I enjoy circus arts, and currently have intermediate-level experience in aerial silks.
TRAINING:
Medical school: Yale School of Medicine (combined M.D. and Ph.D. program)
My neuroscience Ph.D. work at Yale focused on brain imaging of mental illness in search of neurobiological factors that might underlie mood or thought disruptions. The side effect of this work was to familiarize me with coding in Python. To see a list of my research publications ranked by citation count, look me up on Google Scholar.
Residency: Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, where I conducted some research into real-time functional neuroimaging neurofeedback, and as a side effect developed some familiarity with challenges of systems engineering and computer networking.
Additional Psychotherapy Training:
- New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute Psychoanalytic Fellowship, completed 2020
- Intensive Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Program at the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis & Psychology, completed 2021
- Eastern Group Psychotherapy Society Training Program, 2021-2022