Ilang Mae Guiroy, MD grew up in Monterey Bay, California where she spent countless hours working in the local county hospital, serving the Salinas Valley migrant fieldworker population. Through her experiences she got a sense of life bounded by realities of gang violence, undocumented worker status, and language barriers.

She migrated to the east coast to study at Wellesley College, where she indulged her creative and analytical sides by double-majoring in Neuroscience and Art History. During her time there, she studied abroad in Paris at the Sorbonne, competed with the MIT Ballroom Dance Team, taught critical thinking via art education in Boston Public Schools. External to campus life, she grew a passion for human/machine interfaces and worked as a research assistant at the MIT Media Lab Personal Robots Group under Cynthia Brezeal, PhD and later with Adam Gazzeley, MD, PhD at UCSF, where she helped lay the foundational research for a brain training video game grounded in basic neuroscience.

The integration of her interests led her to launch EmSense Corp., raising $21 million in venture capital and becoming a pioneer in the neuromarketing sector. Clients included Proctor and Gamble, Coca Cola, IBM, Red Lobster, Mars, Safeway, MGM, Anheuser-Busch, Miller-Coors, Clorox, etc. During this time, she continued to volunteer in the NICU at Natividad Medical Center.

Following a successful launch, she went on to pursue her Post-Bac at Mills College, a Masters of Science in Bioethics from the Alden March Bioethics Institute on a scholarship and received her Medical Degree from Albany Medical College. She completed research during this time in the Shah Lab at the Harvard Institutes of Medicine/Boston Children’s Hospital, and as a visiting scholar at the Scattergood Program for Applied Ethics of Behavioral Health Care the University of Pennsylvania where she studied the ethics of the criminalization of mental illness and physician assisted suicide for mental illness. Ilang is currently a Chief of Education & Resident Psychiatrist at LAC+USC Medical Center/University of Southern California where she serves some of Los Angeles County’s most vulnerable.