Healing through connection
Year in school: Junior
Advice for other students: You are capable.
Coffee or tea: I make lavender and honey coffee with my phin.
Movie theater snack: Chips and salsa
What's for breakfast: Toast with butter and sugar and scrambled eggs
Guilty pleasure: I love my mobile games.
Last July, Dora Ho flew to Glasgow, Scotland, to present her thesis research at the 2024 International Congress of Infant Studies Convergence.
One of only a handful of undergraduate students presenting a paper at the conference, Ho stood in front of a room full of post-doctoral researchers and professors from schools around the world.
She spent her presentation talking about her thesis work – looking at how thiamine, also known as vitamin B1, impacts a baby’s health and its social and emotional relationship with the mother. Ho is also studying the importance of how children play and how people of all ages learn through play.
Her passion is global health, and she wants to bridge the gap between how other countries and the United States interact when it comes to health research and programs.
Growing up in a space that was both Vietnamese and American has driven her to want to look at things from a global perspective.
“What really pushes me is wanting to give back to the communities I come from,” Ho says. She adds that she also wants “to connect with diverse communities that are immersed in kind of this richer culture in other countries.”
Ho grew up in Hillsboro, Oregon, with her parents who had emigrated from Vietnam to Oregon when they were teenagers. They raised Ho and her younger brother in a strict household. She remembers not being allowed to have playdates or sleepovers growing up.
Instead, she found comfort in spending time with her large, extended family and reading books. When she was little, Ho and her father would get in the car and drive to the local library at least once a week to pick out books and other materials.
“It came to the point where throughout elementary school, I read three to five books a week,” reflected Ho. “That kind of developed my love for learning and reading.”
Reading also helped her stay connected to her culture, as did attending Vietnamese school every Saturday. At the time, she hated having school six days a week. But looking back, she’s grateful to have been able to practice her family’s native language, meet other people, and bond over shared struggles.
“I feel like if I didn’t have that, it would have been really hard to develop my own sense of being a Vietnamese American, like what being Vietnamese means, what being American means, and what being a Vietnamese American means now,” Ho says.
Amanda Ngo, Ho’s cousin on her mother’s side, also went to Vietnamese school and feels that the experience, along with her family and their religion, also connected to her culture.
Until the end of fall term of her sophomore year at the University of Oregon, Ho was part of the Knight Campus Undergraduate Scholars program. Through the program, she had the opportunity to attend her first research conference, the National Diversity in STEM conference in Portland at the end of October 2023. The experience was empowering and helped her understand that she has a place in research fields.
“Knowing that all these people have gone through issues related to diversity or have been labeled as minorities and things like that, and yet they’re still achieving world class science,” she says. “The world goes on and they go along with it and help build it as it goes on.”
Ho is now turning her attention to her thesis research. She reflects on the summer between high school and her first year at the University of Oregon, when she first got involved with the maternal health project. Ho and her fellow incoming freshmen sat in an auditorium, getting ready to listen to a mock lecture. She expected something boring. But when Dr. Jeffrey Measelle of the UO Department of Psychology appeared, she couldn’t help but be fascinated by the topic, she recalls.
Dr. Measelle’s research on infants, based in Southeast Asia, caught Ho’s attention. After the presentation, Ho walked up and asked how she could get involved with the work. Later that year, he agreed to serve as her thesis advisor along with Dr. Dare Baldwin.
“I was talking about Dare and my work in Cambodia and Dora came up right after the talk and said: ‘How do I get involved? I want to do exactly what you’re talking about, and I’m interested in Vietnam as a potential context,’” Measelle remembers. “You could just see right away the lights were so on and she was so present and hungry and excited and articulate.”
Ho always strives to do more and do better. And it’s something that rubs off on others.
“(She taught me) the benefits of being picky,” says Maggie Trail, Ho’s roommate. “If you have the determination to find the exact opportunity you’re looking for, you can find it.”
Ho’s determination recently landed her a job as a medical assistant at PeaceHealth Medical Care in Eugene. She says the experience has helped break down the barrier between academics and the real healthcare world and connect her to people in Eugene.
“It’s one thing to talk about it in a class and know about it, but when you talk to people and you have people breaking down in front of you because they can’t get dental care, they can’t get medical care, or they’ve been putting off going to the doctor because they are in between jobs and taking care of family,” she says. “It really puts all those issues into perspective because it affects these individual people to an amount that is unimaginable.”
Ho’s goal after graduation is to continue working in global health, focusing on maternal and child healthcare. Her Southeast Asian background has enhanced her interest in learning more about how other cultures cope in a changing landscape when it comes to healthcare.
She remembers visiting Vietnam last year with her family. As she was spending time with her mom’s family in the southern part of Vietnam, she felt a more personal connection to the places where her parents were raised. There, she says, it’s like you know your entire neighborhood. Three or four generations of the family live in one house together and everyone in the community helps raise the kids together.
“I was able to see the country in a brighter light,” she recalls. “Just because they do it differently, doesn’t mean that they’re suffering, or they need help, or that they need to change.”