Accomplished Chinese American Alice S. H. Huang: A Personal Success Story Born on 22 March 1939 in Nanchang, Jiangxi, China came to the U.S., 1949, San Francisco, CA. U.S. Citizenship. 1957 Wellesley College (1957-9), John Hopkins University: B.A.1961, Human biology; M.A.,1963; Ph.D.1966, microbiology. How do you become personally successful? No two person have the same recipe. In Alice S. H. Huang's case, it is a combination of offered opportunity at the right place and the right time in addition to the self-discipline and a burning desire to succeed. Alice S. H. Huang was born in China during the Japanese invasion, and soon after the worst attrocity - Nanjing Masscre (the Rape of Nanking) committed by Japanese invading army after they captured the city of Nanjing (Nanking)(1937 38). Nanjing is 300 miles northeast of her birth city, Nanchang in Jiangxi province. Her father, Quentin Kwei Yuan Huang, was an orphan at age 12 in Anhui province in China, and was taken in by missionary John Shryock and educated at the University of Pennsilvania and Philadelphia Divinity School. He became a minister and later an Anglican bishop in China (the seoncd ordained Chinese bishop of the Anglican-Episcopal missionary effort in China ). Her father married her mother, Grace Betty Soong in China, the child of a large landholding family from Jaingxi province. Her parents, Quentin and Grace, came to reside in the U.S., in 1951. Alice Huang started her college education at Wellsley College in 1957. Two years later, she entered into the first class of Barry Wood's 2/5 program that brought her to the medical school of John Hopkins University in 1959. Like Alice said she wanted to be a medical doctor. However, she didn't have the strong stomach to deal with injuried patients. So, she turned to medical research instead. That is the beginning of her successful career. Alice was doing research on the versicular stomatitis virus (VSV), a disease that spreads quickly among cows and horses and cause severe blistering. Her goal was to use VSV to produce interferon, an antiviral protein, to better understand how cells fight virus. Along the way, she discovered something more interesting. She discovered defective interferon (DI) viral particles and was the first to determine that they inhibit the growth and replication of standard VSV in a cell. While presenting a conference paper, she met her future husband, David Baltimore, for the first time. David was already a well known hotshot virologist. Later, Alice ask David's opinion on joining Jonas Salk for doing research, David's advice to Alice was "Don't work with Jonas Salk. Work with me, and bring your own money." Drawing on her VSV expertise, Huang and Baltimore were on the brink of understanding more intriguing process at work in viral replication. After relocating with David to MIT, Alice Huang and David Baltimore were married in October, 1968. The team, Huang, Baltimore and Stampfer, a graduate student, found that VSV brought its own RNA polymerase into the cell along with the negative RNA strand in order to start the process of replication. This pave the way for further discovery that led Balitmore to become a Nobel Prize Winner. However, where was Huang at this time? She was job-hunting! Learning from the career history of a fellow women researcher, she found out that it was important to have her own recognition of her own research work. She began her work at Harvard Medical School. For 20 years (1971-1991), Alice worked hard and heeded to Polly Bunting's advice: "to really focus on your career and publish, get tenure and become a professor, and don't get side-tracked all the committees they'll try to put you on because they want a woman. But once you become a professor, don't forget you are still a woman." She became a professor at Harvard. Just when she thought that she would be at Harvard for rest of her life, she was offered a position as the Dean of science at New York University (NYU). Although she had served as a director of laboratories of Infectious Diseases at Children's Hospital in Boston, the NYU position would be a full time administrator. But since David was going to be the President of Rockefellor University, so Alice accepted the challenge and served as the Dean for Science for 6 years (1991-1997). The, David was recruited to become the President of the California Institute of Technology (CIT) at Pasedena, CA in 1997. So, Alice become the Senior Councilor for External Relations as well as the Faculty Associate in Biology at CIT. This way, Alice can act as an administrator and a professor with an academic position. At the present time, both David and Alice are still at CIT, and yes, Alice is also known as the First Lady of CIT. The record of Alice Huang's achievement is too long to mention here. It is suffice to say that Alice has been receiving awards since 1958 at Wellesley College with a total of 27 Awards and Honors from 1958 to 2001. She has been members of 12 professional societies, and had chaired 42 meetings of various kinds. She has been on 7 editorial boards, and has done community service 19 times and industrial relations 7 times. Finally, she has authered 120 professional publications (1964-2001). Recently, Alice S. H. Huang has been awarded the 1999 Achievement Award from the Chinese American Faculty Association of Southern California for her outstanding contribution to microbiology research and for her dedicated leadership in higher education. She was recognized at the association's 28the annual convention on February 27, 1999, at which she presented a keynote address titled "New Challenges for Chinese American Activism." This is particulary important coming from fellow Chinese Americans. Who would have thought that a Chinese girl from China in turmoil in the 1940s would one day be the famous scientist, professor, administrator and First Lady of CIT, a prestige institution of the advanced learning where many professors are Nobel Prize Winners.