Friends Pay Tribute to SPH Student Killed in Accident

Friends of Yuan-Chun Wang, a School of Public Health (SPH) student who died in a Christmas Eve car accident in Alabama, have been remembering her life and contributions to the Taiwanese community over the past few days.

According to state troopers, Wang was driving through Alabama on her way to New Orleans with a friend--Wen Ling Hsiu, 25, of Athens, Ga.--when she lost control of her friend's car and struck a tree off the side of Interstate 10. She was 25.

At a memorial service over winter break attended by more than 200 people, friends read work by some of Wang's favorite poets, including Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian poet who won the 1913 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Stephen S. Chou, a graduate student in the department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and a friend of Wang's, said many at the memorial were surprised to hear some of Wang's own poetic compositions. Friends found the work on her personal computer as they organized her belongings.

"Writing poetry must have been very private to her," he said.

Friends said Wang, who was on track to receive her doctorate in 2002, wanted to return to Taiwan to research and teach after getting her Ph.D.

While she was away from her homeland, Wang was a visible leader in the Taiwanese community.

Friends in the Harvard Republic of China Student Club (HROCSC), where Wang served as a vice president, said they were impressed by Wang's efforts to recruit friends for club events.

Last June the club invited Chung-Mo Cheng, the head of Taiwan's department of justice, to speak at Harvard. But it was after exams, and many students had already left campus.

"We were worried that there were not enough students to attend it," Chou said. "But at that day we were surprised that many students from other universities attended, and many of them were friends of [Wang]."

Chen-Hsiang Yeang, a third-year graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, said Wang's interest in arts and literature inspired the two of them to form an informal movie-discussion club.

In October, Wang chose the Swedish film Wild Strawberries (1957), and led the group's discussion of the highly-acclaimed story of a cold, aging, lonely professor who reflects on his mortality and the emptiness of his existence.

"She felt compassion for the hero because she thought most people are afraid to open their mind, and express their feelings to others," Yeang said. "But she didn't hide her feelings."

Wang attended university in Taiwan before coming to the United States to pursue graduate work. She received a Master's degree in epidemiology last June and entered a Ph.D. program in environmental health at SPH this past fall.

As a foreign student entering a new discipline, Wang had to overcome doubly challenging language barriers, said David C. Christiani, a professor of occupational medicine and epidemiology at SPH, who oversaw Wang's research for about a year and a half.

"[She had to learn] the everyday ability to pick up what a lecturer is saying. And then epidemiology has its own vocabulary," he said.

But he said she told him that the epidemiology degree, with courses ranging from industrial hygiene to bio-statistics, was a good fit with her interests.

"It's multidisciplinary--that's one of the things that excited her about the field," Christiani said. "You can have pretty broad interests that range from molecular biology to engineering."

After the Master's program, with its emphasis on math and lab technique, Wang shifted to environmental studies because she "wanted to move more and more to doing work with real people, with a human population," Christiani said.

Another memorial will be held Jan. 12 at 5:30 p.m. in the atrium of the SPH's Franois-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights Building, located in Boston.