Kenneth Chang discovered he had a knack for inventing while doing medical missionary work in a rural Taiwanese fishing village.
Short of all sorts of supplies, he recalls using fishnets for sutures, fishhooks for needles and, generally, rigging up a whole menagerie of equipment with whatever his team had on hand.
When he returned to Brown University to finish medical school, his Ivy League colleagues thought he was mad, he said. “I was willing to experiment with materials that most of my peers wouldn’t touch.”
Some 40 years later, Chang’s patents are used in medical offices around the world to treat patients for gastrointestinal health and improve pre-cancer diagnosis and therapy.
After a distinguished career at UC Irvine where he launched the university’s comprehensive digestive disease center and was chief of the medical school’s division of gastroenterology, Chang accepted a new challenge this summer at Hoag.
His vision, backed by a substantial investment from the healthcare provider, is to launch Orange County’s largest digestive health institute in the the next two years, transform the community hospital into a research leader and — eventually — eradicate Orange County of esophageal and colon cancer.