Class of 2023
Julia Wang, MD (she/her)
Hailing from a small suburb in Minnesota, Julia grew up with a deep love for tater tot hotdish and extremely large indoor malls. She attended undergrad at the University of Southern California, where she found herself deeply involved in community and labor organizing. Julia helped run campaigns for living wages, health care benefits, and union recognition alongside workers. It was during this time that she started to understand the intricacies of how race, gender, sexuality, nationality, socioeconomic background, and citizenship status can intersect to impact people’s lives. After graduating, she traveled around the world coordinating with students and international garment worker unions, running campaigns and building solidarity.
In medical school, Julia worked with other students to integrate racial justice and social determinants of health into the formal medical school curriculum. She also explored the policy side of organizing and advocacy through working with the American Academy of Family Physicians. Most importantly, she managed to maintain a solid tan by spending every free moment on the Los Angeles beaches. Julia is ecstatic about starting residency in Seattle at a program that is filled with faculty who model the combined social justice and medical work she strives to do as an attending.
Aisling Zhao, MD, MPH (she/they)
As the child of Chinese immigrants growing up in the suburbs of mid-Michigan, Aisling is proud to join the ranks of the other Midwestern exports in the class!
Aisling proudly identifies as a born-and-raised nerd who grew up on a healthy diet of sci-fi television (Star Trek, Babylon 5, etc.) thanks to her engineer parents. She attended the University of Pennsylvania to major in biochemistry and molecular biology to figure out how the basic sciences could contribute to an amazing post-scarcity future...only to, through her minor in Asian American studies and several years of indoctrination by living in an anarchist vegan co-op, discover an entirely different calling to fight the structural racism and other forms of oppression that functioned to create inequities in health and self-determination.
As she hoped to learn how to leverage her interest in medicine in the pursuit of social justice, Aisling was excited to return to her beloved home state to attend the University of Michigan Medical School and to spend more time with her parents and younger siblings. She developed her interests in reproductive healthcare and gender-affirming care through amazing electives at Planned Parenthood and a sliding-scale community clinic, and her leadership in Med Students for Choice pushed her to interrogate her own assumptions about medicine and reproductive justice. During her master’s of public health year at UM between her third and fourth years, Aisling was able to finally envision how her academic experience could be focused toward action against inequity.
With interests and growing experience in community-based participatory research, mixed methods, and qualitative methods research, Aisling is excited to leverage her skills and experience to learn even more with the people around her, especially by centering the voices of marginalized communities. She hopes to one day acquire enough knowledge and skill so that she can truly understand—and practice—how medicine can function as a tool for social justice, and how (human subjects) research can be a tool for action. On her own time, Aisling enjoys many things, including attempts at home DIY (she's got some shelving now!), playing her violin, reading, video gaming, making fun of Seattle weather, video chatting with family and friends, and messing with her roommates' adorable cats.
Class of 2024
Lucia Amore, MD (she/her)
Lucia was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii, to her horticulturist mother from the Philippines and social worker father from Hawaii. Raised with good food and an awareness of the growing complexities of living in Hawaii, she set out to learn a new perspective she hopes to one day bring back home.
In her time during undergrad and medical school, she became fascinated with how social determinants of health—access to food, education, regular health care—shape every aspect of a patient’s experience of life and medicine. Lucia is inspired by her mentors and patients, especially those at the Homeless Outreach and Medical Education Clinic at the John A. Burns School of Medicine, University of Hawaii. The type of doctor she wants to be cares for the underserved members of our community.
Inspired by federally qualified health centers and the breadth of services they provide to patients, she is proud to join the kind and understanding team at International Community Health Services. She thanks the team for their patience and is grateful for the patients that come to see her. Drawn to the mission of the Cherry Hill Residency of meeting patients where they are at and providing thorough care in all aspects of a patient’s life, she looks forward to all the ways she will grow during her training.
In her free time, she enjoys exploring the delicious food scene of Seattle and experimenting in the kitchen. On her days off, you can find her reconnecting with nature, playing music, or visiting her friends’ dogs.
Ryan Fang, MD (they/them)
Ryan spent their childhood, undergraduate, medical school, and now residency all in the greater Seattle area. Growing up with their loving immigrant parents and rabble-rousing siblings (one of which is an alumni of the class of 2021), Ryan is constantly afforded the space to continually explore queerness and what Asian diaspora means to them. On this quest, Ryan has found community and solace in celebrating LGBTQ identities and fighting for anti-racism.
Their involvement at the University of Washington School of Medicine included co-founding the Queer/Trans Students of Color student group, mentoring and mock interviewing for Alliance for Equal Representation in Medicine, and acting as the communications vice president for National APAMSA (Asian Pacific American Medical Student Association). Ryan is also an active member of Parisol (Pacific Rim Solidarity Network), an anti-capitalist, Taiwanese, Hong Kong, and Chinese diaspora organization for revolutionary international solidarity.
Their clinical interests include LGBTQ health, immigrant health, obstetrics, and abortion care. A few of Ryan's favorite things include piano, video games, anime, speedskating, and the color orange. Ryan did not choose the boba life—the boba life chose Ryan.
Class of 2025
Leena Yin, MD (she/her)
Leena was raised in the Asian immigrant enclave of Fremont, Calif. She completed her B.S. in biology at Stanford University, where her campus theater troupe introduced her to historical and present systemic injustices in the U.S. After volunteering at immigrant-centered community clinics in San Jose and Oakland, she decided family medicine was her path to direct service and structural change, and moved on from college to work as a high school sexual health counselor by day and a reproductive justice organizer with Planned Parenthood by night. She then attended medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, where she conducted research on language access, founded an immigrant health justice organization, and led the National Asian Pacific American Student Association as advocacy vice president.
Leena is now thrilled to be serving marginalized communities in Seattle and to learn how to be a better healer and organizer from her patients, faculty, and colleagues. Outside of medicine, she enjoys curling up in bed with her cat and a good book, and making her way through all the espresso and boba places in her new city.
Veronica Yu, MD (she/her)
V joins ICHS from the East Coast, where she grew up trekking around New England for swim meets and celebrating holidays with extended family in New York City. She is a proud child of immigrants from Burma and Hong Kong and a middle sister of three. V studied sociology and biological sciences at Wellesley College, which first seeded her interest in working at the intersection of illness and structural inequities. After college, she spent two years in Seattle working as a patient navigator at ICHS, which affirmed her desire to fight for the wellness of immigrant communities through medicine and advocacy.
V made her way back east for medical school at the University of Rochester, where she was lucky to collaborate with creative, passionate classmates on movements to support BIPOC medical trainees, to educate university members on the particular barriers to health care faced by migrant farmworkers, and to write policy banning the shackling of incarcerated, pregnant patients in the hospital. She also spent a lot of time swimming in western New York’s many lakes, hosting potlucks, and tending to her vegetable garden.
V is ecstatic to return to Seattle to work and learn with a group of radically caring, committed, and fierce co-residents. She feels grateful for the opportunity to continue caring for and learning from the diverse patient population at ICHS. Her interests in family medicine include hospital medicine, reproductive justice, and palliative care. Outside of medicine, you can find V re-claiming joy via dance parties, lake swims, and constant snacking.
