Mai Dang, MD, PhD, started her formal education in the small town of Janesville, Wisconsin. She and her ethnic Chinese family landed there after they immigrated to the U.S. from Vietnam. They then moved to Chicago when she was in middle school. She attended the University of Chicago for college and majored in sociology with the initial plan to become a journalist. After her second year, she decided journalism was not the right vocation for her but being a doctor was.
After college, she fortuitously was offered a job as a lab technician in Dr. Shutsung Liao’s laboratory in the Ben May Cancer Research Institute at the University of Chicago. Within a month of working in the lab, she knew research had to be a part of her future work as well. She then obtained her MD/PhD at the University of Illinoi in Urbana Champaign. From there, she went to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania) to complete her pediatric residency and child neurology fellowship.
After her six-week rotation oncology during pediatric residency, Dang committed to future research efforts in pediatric brain tumors. After she completed neurology fellowship, she remained at CHOP to establish her sub-specialty in caring for children with neurologic complications of cancer. She returned to the laboratory to study first the metabolism of medulloblastoma and then their myeloid ells and how they affect treatment response. She then joined the faculty of Washington University as an assistant professor. Her lab is a part of the Brain Tumor Center. The lab’s research focus is on uncovering novel ways to modulate the tumor microenvironment to increase the efficacy of existing treatment and minimize neurotoxicity. She immensely enjoys paying forward the strong mentorship she has received through the years with mentoring her own trainees at all levels.
Dang, her husband, Tony who is a senior systems engineer for WashU’s RIS, and their six-year-old daughter, Violet, have so enjoyed living in St. Louis and all it has to offer families. They particularly like museum and public library events, performances by the Opera STL, STL Symphony and STL Children’s Choir, hiking at state parks, and being a part of the STL pet parade on a float in the last two years.