Born in 1970 in Midland, Michigan, to Taiwanese parents, I spent my teenage years in Lake Jackson, Texas. I did my undergraduate studies in chemical engineering at Rice University. Afterwards I obtained a PhD in chemical engineering from Stanford University. My jobs in science included an assistant professorship at Stanford in the early 2000s. More recently I became certified to teach math in Texas public schools in grades 4-12. After my brief experience teaching sixth-grade math, I understood something that my cousin, a university professor, has known for years. He summarized the secret to success in the classroom in a single word: “performance”. By contrast, I describe effective tutoring as “coaching”, the two terms parallel and complementary.

Outside of work, I take art classes from Chu Okoli and Beatriz Fuentes at the Houston School of Art & Design. As a child, I loved taking art in Midland’s public schools. In 2024, I resumed art classes as an adult when reading about Paula Rego: Rego found her dominant artistic medium, soft pastels, in her mid-fifties. I am discovering the making of books also at this age.

Along with my art classes, I exercise at Timberline Fitness Studio. Jennifer Theriot and Dean Theriot guide me in their group strength training, Jeff Raben and Eric Long in their Pilates classes, and Jeff Raben in his martial arts lessons. These instructors are helping me to fight effects of aging: muscle loss, osteoporosis, hypomobility, and even co-contraction. I am feeling stronger, more mobile, and — an unexpected gift — younger.

Jeff Raben’s martial arts instruction shares something with my science tutoring of a middle schooler: one-on-one teaching that maintains a productive confusion just short of collapse and intervenes only when necessary. Keeping a student there is hard because the two failure modes sit close on either side — slightly too much help and the student’s struggle stops; slightly too little and the student can no longer strive. To find that narrow band, the teacher must know the person the student is.

— Updated 26 Jul 2026