Meet Dr. Ong
Hilary Ong, MD, is a Pediatric Emergency Medicine Fellow, 2020, coming to Children’s from the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles. Dr. Ong began her education with a Bachelors of Arts in Asian Studies and a Bachelors of Science in Nutrition at University of California, Berkeley. Following her undergraduate experience, she was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship, during which she conducted an independently formulated research project examining the rise of childhood obesity in China. While in medical school at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine, she continued her global health interests, completing further research on child health in China through the Global Health Pathways program. During her residency at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, Dr. Ong elected to do the Global Health track, beginning an environmental epidemiology project, examining the influence of air pollution on child health in Mongolia. Here at Children’s, she is looking forward to continuing her global health work, and to furthering her investigation into the relationship between child health and environmental change.
Dr. Ong traces her global health interest back to undergrad and her double major in nutrition and Asian studies. She recalls, “I wasn’t sure what I wanted to pursue, I thought maybe I wanted to do a PhD in public health.” So she undertook a year long project through a Fulbright Fellowship, looking at childhood obesity in China; “it was my first experience in global health and I was hooked.” Partnering with a professor of nutrition at UC Berkeley and a pediatrician in China with a nutrition background, it was working with the clinical team that really informed her decision to go to medical school. Dr. Ong describes the project as “definitely an eye opening…and a life changing experience.”
Back in the US in medical school at USF, Dr. Ong wished to continue the work she began with her Fulbright fellowship. Three years following her initial project, the area in which she was focused, the Sichuan Province, suffered a major earthquake. The area sustained serious damage, causing schools to crumble, and many children died in the disaster. Concerned for her friends and former colleagues, Dr. Ong followed the situation closely, watching the immediate aftermath as well as the eventual reconstruction attempts unfold. “The hospital I was in became the center of the reconstruction efforts and hosted a ton of kids who had been injured” remembers Dr. Ong. Seizing the opportunity to help out and observe firsthand the impacts of reconstruction on health, she returned to the area and was “luckily able to work with the same group of researchers and clinicians looking at how reconstruction works,” says Dr. Ong.
While interviewing families about the impact of the earthquake on their lives, she found “every single one of them mentioned how pollution was a factor in their life now.” From the intense and rapid reconstruction efforts that are increasingly common in China, “ the air is polluted and the water is polluted,” observes Dr. Ong. “I really was shocked by these findings,” recalls Dr. Ong, “I was just reading more and more about pollution and how pollution potentially is related to obesity, and I found a growing number of indicators supporting the relationship.” These findings led her to her second project while in medical school, looking at air pollution exposure as a risk factor for childhood obesity. “That was the beginning of a change to my research interests,” she says, “looking at the effect of post earthquake reconstruction on childhood obesity made me aware of the issue of pollution.”
Dr. Ong wanted to pursue this new interest during her residency at Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles. Focusing now on the adverse effects of air pollution on pediatric health, she found a provider at CHLA investigating the the impact of air pollution exposure on fetal health and development. “Just reading about Mongolia, I saw that the capital has the highest air pollution in the world, and it doesn’t get a lot attention” says Dr. Ong. Going there for the first time,Dr. Ong recalls the extremity of the pollution, “you really cannot breathe…that was very impressionable. It was like ‘whoa,’ this very clearly cannot be healthy for anyone living in this area.” Working with her mentor at CHLA, Dr. Ong developed a project investigating the impact of pollution on child health and how it affects birth weight. Noting the lack of studies reporting the impact of pollution on maternal health and the baby in utero, they worked to track fetal growth and development through ultrasounds in these extreme environmental conditions.
Dr. Ong cites this project as the motivation for her current interest in the impacts of air pollution within the DC, Maryland, and Virginia area on kids with asthma. Recently back from a conference about environmental impacts on health, Dr. Ong remains involved in the international community, and is looking to get involved in more global health work. She hopes to meet and potentially collaborate with other physicians and allied health professionals here at CNMC, as well as use her connections and experience to establish more robust clinical and research collaborations between Children’s and institutions abroad in Asia.