[1][2] Instead, Hsiung secured a job testing bacterial and viral vaccines for use in animals at the Epizootic Prevention Bureau of the Ministry of Public Health in Lanzhou.
[1] She obtained her master's degree in bacteriology and then underwent day-long surgery to fuse a congenitally dislocated hip, spending the next nine months in a total body cast.
[4] In order to pay her medical expenses, Hsiung worked for the next two years at the Wene Poultry Laboratory in New Jersey, where she developed the first vaccine for infectious bronchitis virus in chickens.
[1] In Melnick’s lab, she met and collaborated with Dorothy M. Horstmann, a leader in polio research and the first woman to become a full professor at the School of Medicine in 1961.
[5][2][6][3] In 1984, she established the National Virology Reference Laboratory at the Veterans Administration Medical Center (VAMC) in West Haven, Connecticut, to serve VA hospitals nationwide, and became its first director[1][3] This laboratory was created to provide viral diagnostic services to VAMCs in the Northeast and beyond, and to research new methods of rapid viral diagnosis.
VA hospitals nationwide were able to send frozen virus specimens overnight to Hsiung in West Haven, and receive a diagnosis within 24 hours.
[4] From 1992 to 1998, Hsiung traveled annually to the National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan to help establish a model virology laboratory in its Department of Pathology.
This laboratory has since played an important role in diagnosing serious viral infections in the region, such as severe acute respiratory syndrome and avian influenza.
[2] She gave an intensive course entitled “Experimental and Diagnostic Methods of Virology” every 1-2 years for decades in the U.S., China and Taiwan, thus training countless professionals in the field.