I have always been interested in how personal experiences and social factors shape lives and affect health and disease. I want to know how recreational drugs affect sexual decision-making and what can be done to prevent disease transmission.

In 1978, Mua Ngo and his family fled Vietnam by boat. They lived in a refugee camp in Malaysia for two years before emigrating to the United States. At his high school in Oakland, California, he was told that two-thirds of his class would drop out before graduation. He beat the odds and was admitted to Brown University.

But he sought more than success for himself. In 1997, as a junior at Brown University, he helped create the Berkeley Health Sciences Honors Program to expand university enrollment of inner-city students. While designing the program's curriculum, he learned about the health risks among inner-city youth—how cockroach allergens lead to asthma attacks and how early exposure to violence is linked to poor academic performance. His interest in public health was sparked. In 2001, he joined San Francisco's Department of Health and studied the seroepidemiology of HIV among the city's Asian population.