About · Beyond the CV
Roots & Leadership Philosophy
What shapes the work, named briefly — and the professional commitments it produces.
I am the first in my family to attend college, the first to immigrate, and the first to earn a doctorate. My partner and I both built our undergraduate lives in China and our doctoral lives in the United States, and we are raising our young child here without the network of family that surrounded our own childhoods. None of that is the headline of my work. But all of it shapes the work.
What guides my professional choices is the experience of having had to build, for myself, the structures of mentorship, community, and sustainable scholarship that I now design for others. As a first-generation scholar, I learned early that the road map is not given — it is constructed, often by women working quietly across institutions. As a first-generation immigrant, I learned that community is not inherited — it must be intentionally made, in two languages, with respect for what each person carries. As a working parent in academic life without family nearby, I learned that wellness is not a personal coping skill — it is a design problem, and the institutions that ask the most of their educators have a responsibility to design for sustainability.
These experiences are why I build Communities of Practice rather than offer one-off workshops; why I study pedagogical wellness as instructional design rather than self-care; why I have spent more than a decade making the invisible labor of instructional designers visible to the leaders who need to see it; and why a small bilingual book club for first-generation Asian women in Dallas–Fort Worth sits alongside my institutional projects on this site rather than apart from them. The principles are the same.
That commitment extends into coaching. I am in training as an ICF Associate Certified Coach, working toward formal credentialing so I can support instructional designers, health sciences educators, and first-generation scholars through the same lens I bring to Community of Practice design — with care for sustainable growth and respect for what people already carry.
I do this work for the colleagues, students, and emerging scholars who are doing what I once had to do alone. I would like them to have less of a road to construct themselves.