Dr. Yiu Kee Ho's Obituary
Born on June 28, 1940, in Hong Kong, Y.K. spent his early years in Canton until the end of World War II, when he could return home. There, he demonstrated his characteristic work ethic at a young age by tutoring students so that he could realize his goal of attending college in America. His three-week journey by boat in early 1961 took him first to Japan and then San Francisco, CA. He eventually made his way to Los Angeles to enroll at UCLA where he received his B.A. with honors in Bacteriology in 1965. His stories of this time often featured his job cleaning test tubes and how he almost failed German, which he took to fulfill the school’s language requirement. In 1970, he received his Ph.D. in Microbiology from UCLA. He got married that same year and moved across the country to Buffalo, NY, for his first postdoc at Roswell Park Cancer Institute. After surviving two years of extreme winter weather, he ventured onto Iowa City to work at the University of Iowa. He became one of the first postdocs hired by Drs. Michael Brown and Joseph Goldstein when they set up their lab at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas in the 1970s. He spent nearly four decades with Brown and Goldstein, supporting their research that paved the way for the development of the statin class of cholesterol-lowering drugs. When not engaged in scientific pursuits, Y.K. loved the great outdoors and embarked on road trips to visit various national parks; he also traveled the world – South Africa, Vietnam, Japan, Portugal, Spain, Alaska and Hawaii, to name just a few destinations. Most recently, he attended the London 2012 Olympics with his family and explored the English countryside in Cornwall. Y.K. passed away in his home in Dallas, TX, after a brief illness on December 5, 2012, at the age of 72. He is survived by his wife, Joanna; his son, Jeffrey, and his wife, Pamela Torres, and their son, Mateus, of London, England; and his daughter, Yolanda, of Seattle, WA.
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