About Verina Hymn-Mong Leung

Verina Hymn-Mong Leung was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, to parents who immigrated from China and Hong Kong. Her mother, a student demonstrator in the Tiananmen Square protests, fled China following the violent government crackdown on June 4th, 1989, and rebuilt her life in Hawaii. There, she met Verina’s father, who had emigrated from Hong Kong, and together they established their family.

Raised in a household influenced by her mother’s experiences with censorship, Verina navigated a culture that often discounted mental disabilities, a reality that shaped her relationship with her older brother. His eventual autism diagnosis emphasized how erasure, whether cultural or personal, can render individuals invisible, inspiring her to explore the ways human experiences are shaped by society, biology, and circumstance.

Verina carried these formative lessons into her undergraduate journey at University of California, San Diego. She served two consecutive terms as a senator in Associated Students of UC San Diego, the campus-wide student government, advocating for disability justice in higher education. In partnership with the UC San Diego Disability Justice Coalition, she launched an artificial intelligence note-taking system to generate accessible lecture materials, expanding education access for students with disabilities.

As a neurobiology major, Verina approached research as another method to understand the biological underpinnings of complex human experiences. She joined Professor Li Ye’s lab at Scripps Research as a first-year student studying how somatosensory neurons in adipose tissue communicate with the brain to regulate energy homeostasis. Her research investigating somatosensory innervation in adipose tissues led to publications in Nature and Cell Metabolism. Fascinated by multi-organ system interactions, she then led a project developing a click-chemistry labeling technique to visualize covalent drug targets across the mammalian body with spatial and cellular resolution. Her work culminated in a co-first author publication in Cell. For her undergraduate research, Verina was awarded the Robert and Selma Silagi Scholarship, a prestigious honor bestowed upon one graduating senior by the UC San Diego School of Biological Sciences.

Currently, Verina is an MD/PhD student at Stanford University where she plans to pursue a PhD in cancer biology. She aspires to become a surgeon-scientist whose cancer research defines new therapeutic strategies while her clinical practice advances more equitable care for patients with disabilities.