Andy Wen

My world exists on the off chance that a coal miner from Northeast China would someday meet a farm girl from central Washington State. I was born in Spokane, Washington and at the age of 2 we moved to the Seattle area, resettling on the ancestral lands of the Duwamish and other Coast Salish peoples. Aside from living in my dad’s hometown of Harbin for 6th grade, I had lived there all my life before coming to New Haven for residency. After obtaining a B.S. in Physiology at the University of Washington I helped teach comparative vertebrate anatomy and worked as a medical scribe until starting medical school at UW. As a med student, I had three major passions: Anti-racist curricula development that situated medicine within historical and political contexts; understanding the carceral system and care for people impacted by it; and participating in Chinese diasporic grassroots organizing dedicated to cross-movement solidarity and collective liberation. In order to develop skills in advocacy and systems change I decided to pursue an MPH, during which I engaged with sexual violence prevention, sex work occupational health and decriminalization, police violence as a public health issue, and completed my thesis on racial disparities in youth pretrial detention grounded in critical race theory. My interests in psychiatry lie at these intersections and these are the questions I’m excited to grapple with at Yale and beyond: What are liberatory definitions of mental health? What does it mean to be an abolitionist in psychiatry? How are we reproducing carceral logics in our work and our relationships, and what are our alternatives? Outside of medicine I bounce through various hobbies to stay active, from soccer and badminton to boxing and tai chi. Next up is learning to grow food! I also have a habit of collecting piles of books and am fond of jigsaw puzzles, drawing, video games, coffee and chocolate chip cookies.