I am driven by the following question: how might we open up possibilities for people to feel and experience meaningful and dignified lives? This inquiry emerged through my undergraduate studies as a human geographer, which I first examined as a public radio and podcast producer for NPR and The On Being Project. Now, I aspire to practice that caregiving and possibility-opening through medicine.
I completed Goucher College’s post-baccalaureate, premedical program and am a current M.D. candidate at The University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. I am drawn towards narrative medicine and medical journalism, committed to reducing racial disparities in health, increasing medical access, and prioritizing humanism within medicine.
Broadly, I am interested in phenomenology, affect theory, and non- or more-than-representational theories. Particularly, my current interests include the examination of heart rate variability in child psychiatry, wisdom development in medical education, the “arts of living on a damaged planet” as coined by Anna Tsing, and the amplification of meaning-making for individuals and communities.
Current Projects
Senior Producer, Co-Creator — Deep Cuts: Exploring Equity in Surgery
Deep Cuts is the newest podcast from the Department of Surgery at UChicago Medicine. Hosted by Dr. Janani (Jen) Vigneswaran, the show explores how equity and inclusion issues in surgery manifest in the lives of the patients we serve on the South Side of Chicago and how we might begin to correct those disparities.
Episodes for season 1 include topics such as trauma surgery and gun violence, vascular surgery and disparity in limb-sparing vs. amputation across insurance type, prostate cancer and the disparity in long term outcomes of Black men, colorectal surgery and anal cancer screening, as well as food deserts in bariatric surgery, and more.
Bio
Tony Liu is a M.D. Candidate at The University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine and a former public radio and podcast producer originally from Salt Lake City, Utah. He is currently based in Chicago, Illinois.
For The On Being Project, Tony produced the nationally-broadcast, Peabody-award winning program On Being with Krista Tippett, and served as lead-producer and co-creator of the podcast Poetry Unbound, which reached #1 in Apple Podcast's Arts Chart and has received over six million downloads. Prior to The On Being Project, Tony worked as a producer for NPR's TED Radio Hour, Morning Edition, and RadioWest. His work has been featured in Outside Magazine, The New York Times, and The Guardian.
Tony graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2017 as a Morehead-Cain Scholar. He studied affect and non-representational theory under Betsy Olson at UNC Chapel Hill’s Department of Geography. He completed his post-baccalaureate studies at Goucher College in 2021.
