Author Storytime w/ Dr. Shan Woo Liu

Storytime with Dr. Shan Woo Liu, an emergency physician and the local author of Masked Hero, the story of her great-grandfather Dr. Wu Lien-teh inventing the N95 mask. 

Author Shan Woo Liu is the great-granddaughter of Wu Lien-teh. She is an emergency medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School. Masked Hero, her publishing debut, was inspired by her daughter Kaili’s first-grade project about Dr. Wu, written in early 2020. Both mother and daughter are proud to share the story of Dr. Wu and help children understand that heroes come in all shapes, sizes, genders, and races. Shan Woo Liu lives with her family in Massachusetts. 

About Masked Hero:

More than a hundred years before Covid, a deadly pneumonic plague threatened to sweep through Northeast China. Medical experts were summoned to help contain it—among them Wu Lien-teh, who had overcome hurdles to be a doctor since his boyhood in Malaysia. Unlike others, Dr. Wu deduced the disease was spread through airborne bacteria and advocated for quarantines and other measures familiar to readers today, including the use of a face covering he designed from layers of cloth and gauze: the first version of the N95 mask.

Free