Sujit Das, an Energy Division reserach staff member since 1984, was born in Calcutta and raised mostly in New Delhi, India. He came to the U. S. in 1980 after graduating form Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India, and working in a tractor plan for a year which had a collaboration with Ford Motor Company. Since 1980, Knoxville has been his home and he is glad. It is the only single place he has lived most of his life.
He did his graduate work in Materials Science from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 1982, followed by an MBA in 1984. Sujit is now a program leader in the Energy Division where he has been working all along on a variety of projects related to resource modeling, market and cost assessments of energy efficient technologies including lightweight materials. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1999. He got married to Suchita, a cytogenticist born and raised in India in 1987. She currently works for the University of Tennessee, doing research in the field of molecular biology. They have a son, Sreetham, who is 12 years old and attends 7th grade in Farragut Middle School. The Das family enjoys music, travelling, and authentic food from different parts of the world whenever they can. The family has only a few close relatives in the U.S., but maintains a close relationship with their parents, relatives, and friends by frequent visits to India. The recent project supported by the U.S. Agency for Inernational Development related to pollution prevention provided Sujit a great opportunity to give something back to his native country.
Shui Chang is working with the Network Computing Services Group under the Computing Infrastructure Section in the Computing, Information, and Networking Division (CIND).
Shui was born in Puli, a small mountainous town in the central part of Taiwan and lived there until she graduated from National Taiwan University with a B. A. in Economics. She came to the US to study at MTSU and then at Vanderbilt University where she received a master degree in Economics. While at Vanderbilt, she married Hui whom she met in Taiwan earlier. They moved to Knoxville since Hui accepted a teaching position at the University of Tennessee. Shui studied at the University of Tennessee and received a master degree in Computer Science. She has been working for ORNL for about 19 years.
Shui enjoys participating in activities of the Taiwanese Association of America - East Tennessee Chapter (TAA-ET), established 26 years ago in Knoxville. She served as the president previously and currently is a member of the board of directors of the organization.
The activities of the Taiwanese association include the celebrations of Lunar New year, the Duan Wu festival, and the Mid-Autumn festival. In addition to traditional Taiwanese festivals, the Taiwanese organization also takes part in the annual Southeastern US Taiwanese Summer Conference.
The Lunar New Year's day varies from year to year. It was January 15 this year (2001), the year of snake. Taiwanese food was served. Children got traditional Hong-Bao (red envelopes) for Lunar New Year, which contained brand new money.
The Duan Wu festival comes on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month. The most widespread custom associated with the festival is followed: the preparation and eating of Zong Zi. Zong Zi are bamboo leaf-wrapped glutinous rice balls with various kinds of fillings. The story behind Zong Zi goes back to Qu Yuan's death hundred of years ago. After the patriotic poet killed himself in the river, people cast sections of bamboo filled with rice into the river to honor his soul.
The Mid-Autumn festival observes the biggest and brightest full moon of the year, the "Harvest Moon," on the 15th day of the 8th month in the lunar calendar. It usually is between late-September to mid-October. Last year, Taiwanese here celebrated the festival in a park with food, song and laughter. Moon-cake, a round pastry shaped like a full moon and stuffed with all sorts of delicacies, is always prepared and served.
Mrs. Tsui might be the most senior Asian American living in Oak Ridge. She is 94 and in good health. The Chinese consider that life begins at the time of conception. Therefore, she is 95 among the Chinese. In the early 1970s she became a naturalized citizen of the United States. According to Mrs. Tsui, yin and yang must be always balanced in one's diet– a lot of vegetables, a little meat, bone soup, and no deep fried stuff.
Her son, John Hsu, an employee of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Engineering Technology Division, believes the balanced yin-and-yang diet in principle, but enjoys eating T-bone steak topped with A-1 sauce, french fries, cheesecake, pineapple-upside-down cake, and other equally wonderful stuff all the time.
Won Joe - My parents and grandparents lived near Canton, China before the Communists controlled the country. The family moved to Hong Kong when they lost their land to the Communists. I was born in Hong Kong, China. My grandfather and his sons (one of them was my father) immigrated to the United States in the early 1950's. When my father settled in Kingsport, Tennessee with a restaurant business, he sent for his family (Mother and me) in 1957. I grew up in East Tennessee and feel I am fully Americanized.
I received a BS and MS in Industrial Engineering from the University of Tennessee. I have worked at Y12 Plant for twenty years. I spent time in the Engineering Division, Program Management Division, and Technology Services Division. I transferred to ORNL in January 2000 before the contract was awarded to UT-Battelle. I am currently employed as a Commercialization Manager in the Office of Technology Transfer.
I am not married and have no children. I live with one former stray cat. My hobbies are officiating track and field meets at the collegiate and international level. I officiated in the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. I recently took up the game of golf and have started working on the LPGA tour as a walking scorer. I also enjoy scuba diving in the Caribbean (Grand Cayman is my favorite location). Since my parents were restaurateurs, I acquired a knack for cooking all types of cuisine, which is a handy talent when I entertain at home.
Dr. Gloria Mei's work in the Operations, Environment, Safety and Health Directorate focuses on radiation safety related technical services. Dr. Mei joined ORNL in January 1990 and her first four years at ORNL were spent conducting technical studies and upgrade programs in radiation protection. She presently supervises six professionals and technicians to support ORNL operational divisions in the areas of shielding calculation, radiological job review, radiation source control and other radiological engineering disciplines.
Before coming to ORNL, Dr. Mei served 3 years with Teledyne Isotopes Incorporation as the technical manager of the Radon Department and the advisor to the Dosimetry and Radiological Services Department. Dr. Mei moved to the United States in 1983 and earned her Ph.D. degree in nuclear engineering from the Kansas State University in 1986. Before that she was a senior engineer in the Institute of Nuclear Energy Research in Taiwan.
In 1991 Dr. Mei was appointed an adjunct associate professor by the Department of Nuclear Engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is also a certified health physicist of the American Board of Health Physics and a technical assessor of the Department of Energy Laboratory Accreditation Program. Dr. Mei is the author or co-author of over 40 professional journal articles, book chapters, and laboratory reports. Topics include radiation shielding, radiation dosimetry, health physics instrumentation, environmental monitoring, and risk analysis.
Dr. Mei's husband is a technical manager at Duke Energy Company. They have two young adult children. She feels that balancing her professional life and personal life has been challenging but rewarding.
Rajesh Maingi was born in New Dehli, India. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1970 at the age of four
with his parents, Surinder and Prem Maingi, and his brother, Shailesh Maingi. Neither Rajesh nor
Shailesh could speak English when they arrived, but their classmates in Franklinton, North Carolina (a
small town of less than 2000 people), quickly helped them come up to speed. Rajesh and his family
moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1975.
Rajesh completed his B.S. and Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering from NC State University in 1987 and 1992, respectively. He accepted a U.S. Dept. of Energy Postdoctoral Fellowship to work on the DIII-D fusion test device in 1992 under the guidance of staff members from the Fusion Energy Division at ORNL. He became an ORNL staff member in 1997. In 1999, he moved to Princeton, New Jersey, to work on the National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX), a machine in which he contributed to the design. He continues work in several areas of boundary physics, i.e. the physics of the edge plasma where hot plasma comes into contact with cold material boundaries.
Rajesh is happily married to Nola and has 2 children: Logan (10) and Quinn (6). They enjoy outdoor
activities (e.g., hiking, canoeing, etc.) and participating in community events.
The family originated in Goa, an island off the Bombay coast, under the Portuguese influence. Her parents were born in Bombay during the British raj, and Barbara Miller was born and raised in Kuwait, in the Middle East. A few of her early years were spent in Bombay (Maharashtra), on the west-central coast of India. India is a cosmopolitan culture, peopled by various sub-cultures with diverse religions. Muslim and Hindu, Greek and French exist side-by-side. Tolerance is paramount, the food is spicy and the people are warm and welcoming. Of the few years spent there, Barbara vividly remembers the heavy monsoons, the high humidity and a lot of bad-hair days, which made her yearn for drier climes. She soon got her wish when she returned to Kuwait.
In Kuwait, on a good day, the temperature drops all the way down to 110 F in the shade. During the summer months the city shuts down during the day - the heat is unbearable and sand-storms are common. The workday starts at ~6 in the morning and all work stops by 10 a.m. The hottest part of the day is spent indoors or out of the sun to preserve energy. The rest of the workday resumes at ~4 p.m. till ~8 at night. Weekends fall on Thursday and Friday. Kuwait has a very short cold season. Though other religions are tolerated, Kuwait is predominantly a Muslim country; alcohol and pork are taboo - no bacon with breakfast, and no wine with dinner. One of the main industries of Kuwait is shrimping/prawning. Sea food is cheap and the primary choice. Arabic food is tasty to the palate and is a cross between Mediterranean and Indian cuisine. The Bedouins are the natives of Kuwait and still exist today in the outer regions of the country. They live in tents and herd their camels and goats across the dry land.
Very early in her working career, Barbara decided she wanted to travel and see a bit of the world. She did this by working as a flight attendant for a few years. The knowledge gained by this experience proved invaluable. She rubbed shoulders with a variety of people in different countries, got accustomed to folks speaking in "tongues", and was even able to pick-up a few souvenirs. Every now and then she still gets wanderlust, but now she quenches it by going on short road-trips.
Barbara first came to ORNL in 1992 after working in Fernald, Ohio, for a few years. She has worked for P&E, Office of Radiation Protection and now works in the Office of Nuclear Safety. Soon after joining ORNL Barbara completed her CPS and is now working towards her degree in Business Management.
She resides in Kingston with her son Jude who is an Assistant Instructor at the Kingston TTJC Taekwondo School, a budding artist, and an emerging entrepreneur. Barbara encourages Jude to absorb the best of both cultures that is his heritage (American and Indian). She believes that within a few generations diversity will no longer have to be emphasized repeatedly, but will be the accepted norm. More and more inter-racial marriages and the wide spread of technology will see to that, as the world becomes a smaller place.
Ying Xu was born in Changchun city, Jilin Province of China. He is the oldest child in a family of three kids. Both his parents are chemistry professors in Jilin University of China, where he received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in computer science. His two younger sisters now live in Singapore, where one teaches chemistry in the NanYang University of Technology and the other one works as an accountant. Ying enrolled as a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science Department at the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1986, and received his Ph.D. degree in 1991. In the summer of 1988, he made a trip back to his hometown Changchun and married his girl friend Cindy Chenxin Zeng. They now live in west Knoxville with their son Tony, of 7 years old.
After finishing his education, Ying taught mathematics and computer science at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado from 1991 to 1993. He came to Oak Ridge in 1993. Now he is the group leader of Computational Protein Structure Group of Computational Biology Section, Life Science Division. While his training is in combinatorial optimization and theoretical computer science, he has been mainly doing application works to solve biological problems since joining ORNL. His current research interests include developing effective computational methods to fold proteins and to interpret gene expression data. His wife, Cindy, currently works as a software developer at the Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU). While her training was in econometrics, she taught herself computer programming after she quit her job in Denver and moved to Knoxville with Ying in 1993. Their son, Tony, is currently a second grader in the Tate School of Discovery in west Knoxville. Tony's favorite sport is cycling. While all three members of the family are bilingual, they speak Chinese at home.
ORNL Asian Pacific American Heritage Month 2001
ORNL Office of Workforce Diversity
Comments T. J. Honeycutt, 5/7/2001