Interview - Stephen T.C. Wong

Dr. Stephen Wong was born in Hong Kong. After attending a Catholic secondary school, he spent a year backpacking in the Philippines before going on to study electrical engineering at the University of Western Australia in Australia while staying in a Jesuit residential college. Afterwards, he started his career working for Hewlett-Packard in Singapore where he worked on the world’s first inkjet printer and semiconductor chips production automation project. Throughout the first half of his career, Dr. Wong also worked for Bell Labs, Japanese Fifth Generation Computer Systems Project, the University of California in San Francisco, Philips Healthcare, and Charles Schwab, studied computer science, conducted AI and medical imaging research, and developed important medical imaging technology. Important projects during this period include creating the nation’s first digital radiology system at UCSF, the world’s first megabyte memory chip at Bell Labs, the largest radiology information system in France at Philips, and one of the world’s first web brokerage trading systems at Charles Schwab, imaging centers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and bioinformatics center at Harvard Medical School. He came to Houston when Houston Methodist first created the Research Institute. In the second half of his career, he dedicated his time to medicine, specifically in academia. In addition to a prolific career, Dr. Wong is also a vivid tennis player, reads analytic and business philosophy, enjoys classical music, serves on scientific review panels and non-profit advisory boards, and conducts research in cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, drug discovery, digital health, and biophotonics.

View interview transcript PDFFull interview materials on Rice Digital Scholarship