Marilyn P. Wong, MD, MPH, is a retired family and preventive medicine physician with an interest in:
1. understanding history as the ultimate social determinant of health
2 building a health care workforce to serve the underserved AAPI communities
3. preserving the history and lived experience of the AAPI communities
4. promoting equity in maternal health
Since her retirement from clinical medicine, she co-founded:
-AAPI Health Research Group (AAPIHRG), a student organization, 2008
-Certificate in AA Community Health (CAACH), AAADS, UC Berkeley, 2017
-Postpartum Justice Summit, Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, 2019
-Mothers-for-Mothers Postpartum Justice Project, Oakland, 2019
-Pipeline for AANHPI Community Health (PACH), 2020
-AAPI Community COVID Archival Project, AARC, 2021
-CARE Project – Community Archival Resilience and Engagement Project, AARC, 2023
Her recent work has come full circle to her earlier life experience. Dr. Wong began her community advocacy journey in 1968 as part of the “return to the community” current within the Third World Liberation Movement. She dropped out of Berkeley in 1969 and began her life-long education in earnest in San Francisco Chinatown where her grandparents lived. Forty years after the Third World Strike and after a career in medicine, she returned to the Berkeley campus in 2008 as a volunteer to help promote the ongoing goals of the 1968 Third World Strike – (1) establishing academic curricula and research agendas that are inclusive of the Black, Latinx, Native American, and Asian American communities and (2) providing the theoretical and practical trainings to students to analyze and tackle challenges face by under-resourced communities. She served on the City of Berkeley Community Health Commission. Currently, she organizes projects in partnership with the Asian American Research Center and AAADS. She is also serving on the Boards of the UCSF Medical Alumni Association and the Cal Alumni Association - Chinese Chapter.
