Dr. Vivien Dang graduated from Texas Tech University School of Medicine in 2019. Before attending medical school, she earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology and biochemistry/cell biology from Rice University, and a master’s degree in biomedical sciences from the University of North Texas. While in medical school, Vivien made time for a variety of extracurricular opportunities: she participated in Mentors for Medicine, a program in which medical students helped mentor undergraduate students who were interested in applying to medical school; she volunteered for Project CURE, a project that aimed at gathering and distributing donations of pediatric anesthesia airway supply kits to developing countries; she founded Texas Tech’s Neurosurgery Student Interest Group.

Additionally, Vivien has expressed an interest in experiencing and learning from the diverse healthcare practices in other parts of the world: she completed a two-week externship in Borsod County University Teaching Hospital in Miskolc, Hungary, and a week-long rotation at K Hospital, a large cancer medical center in Hanoi, Vietnam. Although she plans to establish her practice in the United States, Vivien is eager to collaborate with medical centers outside the country and to participate in humanitarian projects to help improve healthcare in developing countries. She has won numerous awards for a research project she developed and conducted in collaboration with several other classmates that took place in Vietnam. These included an International Education Fee Award to partly fund the project, the Most Impactful and Most Innovative Awards at the Houston Global Health Collaborative Conference, and 1^st place for the Dr. Lorenz Lutherer Clinical Research Award at Texas Tech’s student research week in her 2^nd year of medical school. In her 3^rd year, Vivien won first 1^st place in Texas Tech’s medical student research competition for her poster presentation of a familial Chiari malformation case.

Vivien is interested in skull base surgery and neurosurgical oncology. However, she is still keeping all her options open and is eager to learn about all the facets of neurosurgery.