Anna Chao Pai

Pai as a predoctoral student at Albert Einstein College of Medicine
(photo: Smithsonian Institution Archives)

Anna Chao Pai (b. 1935)^[1] is an American geneticist and professor emerita at Montclair State University.^[2]

Biography

Anna Chao was born in China, and immigrated to the United States with her parents in 1938 following the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.^[3] Her paternal grandfather was Zhang Zuolin,^[4] who was assassinated prior to the invasion in 1928. She and her parents fled Manchuria, first to Beijing then to the United States. A brief family visit to China followed in 1939, but her parents never returned to the country after the Communists won the Chinese Civil War.^[3]

She enrolled at Sweet Briar College, where she earned freshman and Dean's List honors.^[3] Working part-time as a waitress, she earned a degree in zoology at Sweet Briar.^[3] She later earned a master's degree in embryology from Bryn Mawr College, and a Ph.D. in developmental genetics from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, and worked as a researcher and professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey, where she was known by the nickname "Chips".^[3]

She later married David Pai, the grandson of the National Revolutionary Army general Bai Chongxi, who had worked with her uncle Marshal Zhang Xueliang during the Kuomintang Northern Expedition.^[5] In 2009 they moved to Davidson, North Carolina.^[5]

She is the author of the genetics textbooks Foundations of Genetics: A Science for Society (McGraw-Hill 1974, ISBN 978-0070480933) and Genetics, Its Concepts and Implications (Prentice Hall 1981, ISBN 978-0133510072).

Awards and recognition

• Ten Outstanding Young Americans, 1965^[3]
• Phi Beta Kappa Society, 1972^[3]
• Sweet Briar College "Distinguished Alumna", 1994^[3]

References