Last June the club invited Chung-Mo Cheng, the head of Taiwan's department of justice, to speak at Harvard. But it was after exams, and many students had already left campus.

"We were worried that there were not enough students to attend it," Chou said. "But at that day we were surprised that many students from other universities attended, and many of them were friends of [Wang]."

Chen-Hsiang Yeang, a third-year graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, said Wang's interest in arts and literature inspired the two of them to form an informal movie-discussion club.

In October, Wang chose the Swedish film Wild Strawberries (1957), and led the group's discussion of the highly-acclaimed story of a cold, aging, lonely professor who reflects on his mortality and the emptiness of his existence.

"She felt compassion for the hero because she thought most people are afraid to open their mind, and express their feelings to others," Yeang said. "But she didn't hide her feelings."

Wang attended university in Taiwan before coming to the United States to pursue graduate work. She received a Master's degree in epidemiology last June and entered a Ph.D. program in environmental health at SPH this past fall.

As a foreign student entering a new discipline, Wang had to overcome doubly challenging language barriers, said David C. Christiani, a professor of occupational medicine and epidemiology at SPH, who oversaw Wang's research for about a year and a half.