Esther Ting was a happy child who loved to read and travel to Japan with her father, George Ting, MD. When she became a teenager, Esther encountered challenges that many her age face, but it was a phone call during her freshman year at college that made her father realize just how much she was struggling.
Despite the best efforts of her father and friends, Esther died of a drug overdose just short of her 19th birthday.
This excerpt from a moving short film highlights Ting's journey from loss to healing and explains why he chose to establish the Esther Ting Memorial Professorship in Addiction Medicine at Stanford. As he describes, Stanford is "an institution that could make a big difference in the long term" by both enabling the development of new treatments and influencing the enactment of more effective public policies to address issues related to addiction and substance abuse.
Keith Humphreys, PhD, who has more than 30 years of experience as an influential addiction researcher and clinician, was chosen as the inaugural holder of the professorship. Through his gift, Ting is furthering Humphrey's work while honoring his daughter's memory and helping to improve health outcomes for other families battling addiction. It's something, Ting said, "that feels just right."
Video by Medical Center Development; photo courtesy of George Ting