NEW BEGINNINGS

In early 2023, a new First Family moved into Westwood: 13th Purdue president Mung Chiang, his wife, Kei Hui, and their three children.

Hui is excited to take on her role as First Lady of the university and looks forward to collaborating with community and campus partners. She wants to help new Purdue families feel welcomed as they integrate into the community. She also brings her own set of passions—from alumni engagement to preventive health care and population health promotion.

“Mung and I are very different even though we share a similar background,” says Hui. “Our personalities, hobbies, and habits are very different. He’s more of a leader, and I’m more of a manager.”

She describes the president as someone who focuses on the big picture and thrives in strategic planning while she prefers to execute tasks and manage the day-to-day aspects of their family.

Hui grew up in Hong Kong and played an important role as the eldest daughter in a single-parent family. “We encountered family adversities and crises, yet I received a lot of help from my middle school and church during the hardship.”

She was inspired by medical missionaries, which led to her dream of pursuing medical school.

Hui began her career as an intensivist in the critical care unit at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Hong Kong. She moved to the United States to join Chiang and then completed her internal medicine residency at Pennsylvania Hospital in the University of Pennsylvania Health System. She went on to earn a master’s degree in population health management from Johns Hopkins University, shifting her career toward disease prevention and health promotion.

Hui was greatly impacted by her family life, immigration, and medical training. “Those experiences shaped and strengthened me,” she says. “I’ve actually surprised people in certain tasks that they think I cannot do.”

Before moving to West Lafayette, Hui was the advocate and director for residency patient safety and led quality improvement curriculum for the morbidity and mortality conference at St. Vincent Hospital in Indianapolis. She built a multidisciplinary team to prevent adverse medical events and improve patient safety and the quality of patient care.    

In addition to her role as First Lady, Hui is now a practicing physician and physician advisor in internal medicine. She is passionate about consolidating local health care to cater to the growing needs of the university community, and she is heavily involved in an early childcare task force. She also enjoys engaging in student life and alumni events. The First Lady’s office established a website providing categorized and integrated community resources especially for faculty and staff newcomers.

Announced this fall, Hui is leading the charge in developing the Purdue Alumni Medical Network (PAMN) with the Purdue for Life Foundation. The goal is to build a network of alumni and friends working in the health-care field—including veterinary medicine—and enhance their connections to Purdue and to each other.

Stephanie Stahl (S’06), a sleep medicine physician and neurologist at Indiana University Health, is excited to be involved as a colead of the PAMN interim committee.

“The Purdue Alumni Medical Network is an exciting opportunity for those of us in the medical field,” she says. “It’s an excellent way to network with health-care professionals, provide mentorship to students and those early in their careers, and share our enthusiasm for Purdue.”

“With the state of health inequities and disparities in our world today, it’s exciting to see more than 700 alumni, friends, and students who have expressed interest in the affinity network,” says Maria Whipple (MS PG’20), director of affinity networks at the Purdue for Life Foundation. “This energizes me to advance programming that will contribute to the health of our society by promoting optimal patient care.”

The PAMN leadership team will host a launch event in April 2024 to bring health-care alumni and friends together. In addition, Hui is leading the new group in the planning of a fall 2024 symposium, collaborating with local community health-care organizations.