Flossie Wong-Staal, one of the world's foremost authorities in the field of virology and a member of the team that co-discovered HIV, will be the keynote speaker at the Fourth Annual Asian Heritage Awards at 11:30 a.m. on Tuesday, May 22, at the prestigious Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice of the University of San Diego.
Wong-Staal is one of America's pioneer researchers of AIDS. Along with her colleagues at the National Cancer Institute, she was the first researcher to clone, or make a copy of, the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the virus that causes AIDS, which allowed them to decipher its structure.
The Asian Heritage Awards were started May 2004 by ASIA, The Journal of Culture & Commerce Publishers Rosalynn Carmen and Leonard Novarro to recognize the achievements, accomplishments and community service by individuals of Asian and Pacific Islander decent, and to serve as a vehicle to bring diverse elements of the community together.

Wong-Staal, who moved to the University of California at San Diego in 1990, continued her AIDS research, working specifically in gene therapy, one of the most technologically sophisticated areas in medical research. She is currently focusing her efforts in finding new treatments for hepatitis C virus and cancer at Immusol, a biotech company she co-founded. In 1990 she was listed by the Institute for Scientific Information as the top woman scientist of the past decade and the fourth-ranking scientist under age 45.
Wong-Staal was born Yee Ching Wong in mainland China in 1946. She emigrated to the United States to study at the University of California at Los Angeles, where she earned her bachelor's degree and then went on to graduate studies in molecular biology. She attended the University of California at San Diego for postgraduate work in the same field. In the early 1970s, having completed her schooling, Wong-Staal took a position with the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md., where she worked in the field of retroviruses with the prominent researcher Robert Gallo, credited as the co-discoverer of HIV.