Wilson Ko, M.D. was an American cardiothoracic (heart and lung) surgeon practicing in New York City who was an Ellis Island Medal of Honor recipient in 2008. He has served as professor of surgery at the New York Medical College, State University of New York, Cornell University Medical College, and as the chief cardiothoracic surgeon at Saint Vincent Hospital-Manhattan, State University of New York Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, and New York Hospital Queens. His community services include serving as the president of Chinese American Medical Society, the president of China AIDS Fund (6), vice-chairman of the National Council of Asian Pacific Islander Physicians (7), board director in American Cancer Society-East Asian Unit, Chinese American Cardiovascular Association (8), and Chinatown Partnership Local Development Corporation (9). He was featured as one of the eight most influential Chinese Americans in the ViViD magazine (10) in 2011. Early life Dr. Wilson Ko immigrated to San Francisco, California with his family at the age of 12, and was naturalized as a U.S. citizen at the age of 18. He was selected to San Francisco’s premiere public college preparatory Lowell High School, where he graduated in the top 1% of his class with Scroll Honorary distinction and achieved the highest scores for the advanced placement examinations in biology, chemistry, physics, and calculus. He attended University of California at Berkeley and graduated with distinct honor in biochemistry. This was followed by a medical degree from Chicago Medical School, where he graduated as valedictorian. Education Ko underwent one of the most competitive postgraduate training in general surgery for five years under G. Tom Shires, M.D. in the prestigious New York Hospital—Cornell University Medical. During this training, he spent an additional two and a half years of cardiothoracic surgery research under Karl Krieger, M.D. During this time, he published 32 peer-reviewed scientific papers. He was then selected in an equally competitive and highly sought-after cardiothoracic surgery training program for the next two years also at New York Hospital—Cornell University Medical Center under the direction of O. Wayne Isom, M.D. Immediately after his surgical training, he was recruited to the Cornell faculty in the department of cardiothoracic surgery. In the ensuing 11 years, he was promoted from assistant to associate professor. He was a founder of a new Cornell satellite heart surgery program at New York Hospital of Queens, where he served as the director from 1999 to 2006.