Year 4. May 27.
[INTRO]
For Moira Ann Desphy, MPH, Giving Back to Her Community is Best Part of Her Job
When Moira Ann Desphy, MPH, program manager at the UCLA Center for Asian Health and multiprogram coordinator for the UCLA Department of Medicine (DoM), reflects on the values from her Filipino heritage that have helped her professionally, two come to mind: kapwa and bayanihan.
“Kapwa is shared identity in which you are part of the community, so not only am I serving the community, but I’m also part of it — in serving them, I serve myself, and vice versa,” Moira explained. “Bayanihan is uplifting your community.”
The values of kapwa and bayanihan also tie in well with the theme of this year’s AANHPI Heritage Month, “A Legacy of Leadership and Resilience,” she added.
“Bayanihan really emphasizes standing on the shoulders of those before you,” she said. “And I think of all the leaders who have shown extreme resilience before me. I stand on their shoulders, and they supported me throughout. Now I get to put that effort back into the community.”
As program manager, Moira is responsible for spearheading the communications strategy for the Center for Asian Health and for working with collaborators on ways to promote its work. That includes a recent webinar on emerging cancer patterns in Asian-Americans that was conducted in partnership with the Mount Sinai Center for Asian Equity and the Brock Institute at Dominion University, for instance, as well as events held in conjunction with the Asian Pacific American Student Association at DGSOM and InspirASIAN, one of the UCLA Health affinity groups.
“What I love most about my job is that I get to create spaces that uplift and empower my community so that we can support each other,” Moira said. “As a member of the Asian American community, it was very important to me to be able to put work back into it.”
Thank you so much, Moira, for your incredible work for our department!
An Lu Recognized for LEADERShip Excellence
I am now excited to shine the spotlight on An Lu, director of compensation in the DoM. An was recently named one of the winners of the 2025 AP Staff of the Year Awards, accolades that recognize academic personnel in DGSOM who are outstanding LEADERS that create positive work environments.
“I felt honored to receive the award, especially among many incredible colleagues who are equally deserving,” An said. “It was a moment of reflection on the dedication and hard work I put into my role. I feel grateful.”
An must balance many responsibilities in her role, including the oversight of ten employees who handle payroll, faculty onboarding, merits and promotions, and leave of absence administration. She also offers guidance to faculty and division managers on sensitive leave of absence and compensation matters to assure clarity and compliance. She turns to calendars and lists to help her stay organized, and delegates tasks to her team to keep things running smoothly.
“Clear communication helps me stay on top of things and quickly handle any issues that come up,” An said. “Staying flexible and focused helps me manage my responsibilities effectively.”
As a manager, An tries to create a positive environment where everyone feels comfortable sharing ideas and asking questions. She also works hard to ensure that team members have all the resources they need to be successful in their roles.
“I believe people do their best work when they feel supported and valued,” An said. “By encouraging collaboration and respect, I help build a workplace where everyone feels motivated and appreciated.”
An is proud of her team for the many challenges they have overcome so far this year. From staff payroll reorganization to the LA fires to rapidly-changing state and federal laws, they have remained adaptive and professional.
“Their dedication and teamwork inspire me every day, and I’m grateful to lead such an amazing group,” An said.
As a first-generation Vietnamese-American, An believes that her family’s sacrifices instilled in her the values of hard work and education. Their resilience inspires her to keep going even when things get tough.
“Family is everything to me. Their support and struggles remind me why I work hard — to honor them and create a better future,” An said. “Dedication drives me every day. Whether in my work or within my community, I want to make a difference and help others.”
She is also inspired by the dedication she sees around her through her colleagues at UCLA.
“UCLA and the DGSOM provide an incredibly meaningful environment for me to do my work,” An said. “I am fortunate to work alongside dedicated colleagues and faculty who are passionate about advancing education, healthcare and research.”
An is grateful to her husband and kids for their encouragement as she grows her career in the DoM. She is also thankful for her team, colleagues and Chief Administrative Officer Yanina Venegas for their guidance and collaboration along her journey.
Congratulations to An on this much-deserved award! LEADERS like you are the reason why the DoM is a wonderful place to work.
[KENNY STORY]
Katie Y. Hu, MD Champions the Power of East-West Medicine
UCLA Center for East-West Medicine Associate Director Katie Y. Hu, MD wasn’t always passionate about Eastern medicine. As a child growing up in a Chinese household, she took the odd tincture or herb to ward off a cold; she would watch her father perform acupuncture on her grandmother — an odd practice, she thought back then, given that he was an engineer.
“I was exposed to it, but I didn’t understand it,” Dr. Hu said.
But a seed was planted nonetheless, and her interest grew as she did. She wrote a college application essay about how she would use a hypothetical $10,000 grant to establish a program that brought together Eastern and Western medical practices. Years later, a fateful five-day rotation in East-West medicine during her residency in family medicine here at UCLA turned curiosity into destiny.
“In five days, I felt like it had helped me understand some of the most complex patient patterns,” Dr. Hu said. Today, she is a LEADER in the field as a driving force behind the center’s growth and as the director of the UCLA East-West Integrative Medicine Fellowship Program.
To Dr. Hu, the power of Eastern medicine lies in its ability to offer an explanation for “why” something is happening, as opposed to Western medicine’s emphasis on the “what”. That philosophy enabled Eastern medicine practitioners to make connections thousands of years before they would be observed by Western ones.
“Chinese medicine specifically, even 3,000 years ago, had already discovered that the lungs and the large intestine are connected and they have clinical manifestations in the skin,” Dr. Hu said. “That is actually the case in conventional medicine too — such as in inflammatory bowel disease, where there are lung, gut and skin manifestations of the disease. In recent years Western researchers are now looking into the gut-lung axis.”
Perhaps even more prolific is Eastern medicine’s age-old capacity to connect the mind and body. Those of us who practice conventional medicine are well aware that many conditions are impacted by a patient’s emotional state. However, Chinese medicine offered the earliest evidence that mental suffering can manifest as physical symptoms.
“Chinese medicine was the first to connect tendon pain with anger, and to offer an explanation for why you might wake up at 3 a.m. instead of 5 a.m.,” Dr. Hu explained. “There are so many things about its theory that helps give a lens to patients to understand not just what’s happening, but why it’s happening.”
At the UCLA Center for East-West Medicine, Dr. Hu and other practitioners guide patients with tools from traditional Chinese medicine such as acupuncture and cupping; tools from complementary and integrative health such as supplements, yoga, lifestyle counseling; and self-care promotion. They integrate all of this with conventional medicine. Thanks to philanthropy, the center recently launched pediatric clinical and education program for pediatric populations — a potential way to alleviate the growth of chronic conditions among young people.
“We have a pediatric crisis right now where one in three kids have chronic pain, one in five kids have mental illness and one in four to five kids are on some kind of prescription medicine — these are not sustainable data points,” Dr. Hu said. “It's important that we give adults these extra tools from integrative medicine, but we need to do so for kids as well.”
Looking to the future, Dr. Hu hopes that the UCLA Center for East-West Medicine will continue to exemplify this AANHPI Heritage Month’s theme, “A Legacy of Leadership and Resilience.” The Center’s explosive growth during the pandemic suggests a heightened interest in evidence-backed integrative approaches that help to build resilience.
“In modern culture, we want to just keep going even if we’re sick and we’re in pain, rather than pausing and allowing our bodies to heal,” Dr. Hu said. “The Center for East-West Medicine provides tools to cultivate resilience, and I hope its lasting legacy will be leadership in transforming how we understand health and in advancing true healing.”
Thank you, Katie, for your leadership and your commitment to holistic patient care!
Data Disaggregation Study Shows Discrepancies in Type 2 Diabetes Development Among AANHPI Cancer Survivors
Much epidemiological research on health conditions has historically grouped Asian-American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander populations together, erasing nuances that could point to opportunities to improve community health outcomes. A recent study led by UCLA Division of Digestive Diseases researcher Mia Hashibe, PhD and UCLA Fielding School of Public Health Chair of Epidemiology Zuo-Feng Zhang, MD, PhD demonstrates how disaggregating data about discrete communities can reveal important blind spots— in this case, on the risk of type 2 diabetes (T2D) following diagnoses from colorectal cancer (CRC). Their findings showed that older individuals of Southeast Asian and South Asian descent were as much as four times as likely to develop T2D following CRC as non-Hispanic whites.
“The implications are that we need some effort to prevent diabetes in the older Asian colorectal cancer survivors, if possible, and that we need to look at specific Asian groups separately, because most of the previous studies have grouped Asian, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders together,” Dr. Hashibe said. “They have different risks, different risk factor profiles, different cultural factors. There's just so many things that are heterogeneous between these populations that I think it's important to study them separately.”
Dr. Hashibe’s group conducted their research using SEER-Medicare databases — large, anonymized registries containing clinical, demographic and cause of death information for people with cancer along with Medicare claims for covered health care services made from the time of their eligibility to their death. Their study contained data on 2,901 Asian-American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders and 6,463 non-Hispanic white CRC survivors who were diagnosed between 2000 and 2017. Among them, 715 of the non-Hispanic white survivors and 484 of the Asian-American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders developed T2D after CRC.
While the total combined population of Asian-American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders did have an elevated T2D risk overall compared to non-Hispanic white survivors, larger differences emerged when the researchers disaggregated the data. Southeast and South Asian survivors had the highest relative T2D risks — 2.6-fold and four-fold higher risks, respectively. Colon cancer linked to earlier T2D development after diagnosis and rectal cancer associated with later development. East Asians were at greater risk as well.
Meanwhile, the association for Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander populations did not reach statistical significance. Dr. Hashibe noted that this was surprising given that previous studies on lung and breast cancer have found increased risks for T2D among survivors from those populations as well.
A “hidden” obesity epidemic among Asian Americans could explain some of the findings. The screening criteria for obesity is different in Asian Americans than it is in non-Hispanic whites — Asian Americans should be considered obese at 23 kilograms per kilometer squared rather than the 25 kilograms per kilometer cut-off used for non-Hispanic white individuals. Yet many physicians do not know this.
Additionally, “even if the person does not look obese, it is possible that the fat pattern in the body is different” in a way that promotes T2D, Dr. Hashibe added. Furthermore, there may be a misperception among some Asian-Americans that they are healthy when they are not.
“Asians do tend to think that we're healthier because we have lower obesity, smoking and drinking, and the cancer rates are lower too, but that doesn't mean they aren’t diagnosed with cancer and that there aren’t consequences after the cancer diagnosis,” Dr. Hashibe said. As a result, “Prevention efforts for Asian cancer patients need more attention.”
The study was observational and therefore should not as the sole basis for clinical guidelines. But clinicians should still be aware that Asians are at higher risk for T2D following CRC, so it may be wise to monitor their health a bit more closely, Dr. Hashibe said.
Dr. Zhang sees this kind of work as the start of a new field of study that is especially important in Southern California, which is home to Asian-Americans of many different backgrounds. It could eventually lead to more nuanced guidelines.
“Right now, most of our guidlelines are Caucasian-based, with Asian populations largely ignored,” Dr. Zhang said. He sees the study’s methodology as being useful to research on other ethnicities as well, including Hispanics — another diverse population that is often treated as a monolith.
“My guess is that Hispanics would have the same issue, so that is one future direction,” Dr. Zhang said.
Congratulations to Dr. Hashibe and her team on an outstanding and important study!
Dale
P.S.
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