I hear from our College president that your brother went to Oberlin, and attending his Commencement weekend helped influence your decision to go into public health. What’s the story there? D.A. Henderson was the Commencement speaker, and I heard him and I was in medical school at the time. I had been thinking about public health as an option, and Henderson was one of the co-founders of the smallpox eradication program. And I’ll talk about this at Commencement, but he kind of verified what I thought I wanted to do, which was — Wow. You can eradicate diseases off the face of the earth. You can work with people. You can do something that makes — not just as a physician, you know, in medical school you th...

How did you get into the field of journalism? I knew from the time I was in high school that I was considering journalism as a career, and I was editor of the Review as a junior. About three months before graduating, I got a call from the Washington columnist Jack Anderson with whom I had interned between my junior and senior years. I was intending to take the summer after graduation off and maybe go to graduate school, but Jack woke me up one morning in April and offered me a job. [I headed straight to Washington] the day after graduation. I piled everything I had into an old, beat-up Toyota Corolla and made my way there. I worked for Jack Anderson for about a year and a half and then I went to graduate school at Columb...

Why did you decide to form BINA? We formed it in the beginning to network and help one another any way we could -- with a job, with housing. We just wanted to create a network for newcomers, which we knew from experience that it isn’t easy to be. So we said, “Why don’t we form a small organization?” And then as time went by, we decided to incorporate and we said, “It’s about time that people know more about the culture and heritage, and we need to spread the beautiful culture we have....