Title: Jon B. Wang: A First-Class Philanthropist

Byline: By Paige R Penland

 Jon Wang, MD is a member of the the UNM School of Medicine's very first graduating class who has been giving generously for over 48 years.

“I feel so grateful for the quality of education that I received at The University of New Mexico,” Wang says. “As soon as I could afford to, I began contributing.”

Wang was born in Kweiyang, China. His family moved to India, South Carolina and British Guiana before settling in Grants, N.M. He went on to help the New Mexico Military Institute’s swim team win the 1957 state championship. Sports would become a lifelong passion and vocation.

After graduating, Wang was accepted to Princeton, but he became “distracted,” he says. Though his grades improved in his senior year, he couldn’t get into the prestigious medical schools his family wanted for him. Instead, he came home for graduate work at UNM, while his father, a London-educated physician, contacted British universities.

Then he got the news: UNM’s brand-new medical program had accepted him. “I had no idea what I was getting into,” he remembers. “It would be the most inspirational, stimulating educational experience of my life.”

It was a two-year program at the outset, with 24 students, 27 instructors. UNM converted an old 7-Up bottling plant next to the Bernalillo County Indian Hospital into a library and biochemistry lab, while a nearby condemned mortuary became the anatomy lab and lecture hall.

“We didn’t follow the standard medical school curriculum,” Wang says. “We learned systems. For example, the cardiopulmonary system. In the lab we were opening and dissecting the chest, heart and lungs. At the same time, we had lectures from physiologists about their function. Pathologists talked about diseases, pharmacologists the medications used to treat them.”

Students interacted with patients from their first week in medical school.

“Dr. Papper [Internal Medicine] or Dr. Senescu [Psychiatry] would interview the patient, then take us outside,” Wang says. “They asked us what we saw. One student said, ‘I saw a paranoid schizophrenic!’ Dr. Senescu replied, ‘I used to know about those things, but now I think in terms of love, hate, anger and fear.’ That’s the way he taught us about human emotions, to care about our patients.”

When the UNM Board of Regents expanded the program to a full four years, the classmates discussed whether to move on. Not one left, Wang says. “UNM was an adventure in education that we appreciated and enjoyed. We didn’t want to go anywhere else.”

A Remarkable Career

 After graduating, Wang went on to serve as a parachutist and Green Beret in Vietnam, and was accepted to several prestigious post-doctoral programs, including the Roosevelt Hospital at Columbia University and Cornell Medical Center. In 1973, he became one of the country’s first fellows in orthopedic sports medicine.

“I was just as well prepared as all those contemporaries who came out of the big ivory towers of the Northeast,” Wang says,. “And I had the extra sensitivity with patients that I’d learned at UNM.”

In 1977, he began working with the University of Arizona and its 19 intercollegiate teams. Wang also worked with the Cleveland Indians and the Colorado Rockies, and served as president of the Tucson Orthopedic Society and director for the Arizona Orthopedic Association.

Among his patients were Ted Bruschi, famed linebacker for the New England Patriots, and Nick Foles, quarterback for the Philadelphia Eagles and MVP in Super Bowl LII.

Sports wasn’t just a vocation. At 60, Wang completed the New York City Marathon, and at 73, the Athens Classic Marathon.

“Sports keeps you young,” he says. And so, they say, does generosity.

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