Stories From

Bozeman & Beyond

Calvin D. Sun, Md

emergency physician on NYC’s COVID frontlines & founder & CEO of the Monsoon Diaries, a travel community 

You might recognize Calvin Sun, MD, who has been one of the early faces and names of the pandemic,  sharing his experiences on the front lines of COVID in NYC, where he works as an emergency room physician.  Outside of the ER, he has a travel company he started a decade ago called Monsoon Diaries, which offers group travel for people who hate group travel.

Calvin D. Sun, MD is a currently practicing Attending Physician and Clinical Assistant Professor in Emergency Medicine, a public speaker, phoblographer, activist, choreographer, and entrepreneur based in NYC.

Calvin is also the Founder & CEO of The Monsoon Diaries: a blog-turned-travel community that has taken hundreds of readers to 190+ countries and territories in the past 10 years including North Korea, Nauru, Iraq, and Antarctica. The Monsoon Diaries has since been featured on BBC News, ABC News, MSNBC, TED, National Geographic, and USA Today.

He completed his residency training at Jacobi Medical Center in 2018 where he served as the Director of Resident Wellness. Calvin now practices as an attending physician at multiple underserved emergency departments and large-scale events around the country, including having been designated as the supervising medical captain at the finish line of the annual NYC Marathon.

Calvin has been most recently notable for his first-hand reporting on the 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic in New York City emergency rooms. Finally, he has been a prolific nationwide public speaker since 2008, and continues to be one of the most active Public Speakers in the Asian American speaking circuit.

Resources:
Calvin D. Sun, MD 
https://www.linkedin.com/in/calvindsun/
Calvin on Wikipedia
www.monsoondiaries.com
Monsoon diaries on Instagram
Monsoon Diaries on Facebook
Take the Path of More Resistance (Calvin Sun) TedX Talk (2015)

COVID-related articles + interviews with Calvin:
Emergency room doctor gives inside look at supply shortage in New York City   (CNN)
An ER Doctor Shares Heartbreaking Stories from the Front Lines of COVID-19 (Katie Couric)
Lisa Ling on Instagram (interviewing Calvin)
ER doctor in NYC shares what it’s like to work in dozens of hospitals during pandemic (NBC news)
Scrolling the Pandemic: Silenced Frontliners (Fox)
LIVEMEDAID: Dr. James Maskalyk and Dr. Calvin D. Sun

Calvin’s book recommendations:
The Alchemist  (Coelho)  & Life of Pi (Martel)
Fight Club (Palahniuk)
The Year of Magical Thinking (Didion)
This is Water”  (David Foster Wallace)

Recent Podcasts

EPISODE #100 - JOHN MCPHEE

on writing, teaching, exploring

John McPhee was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and was educated at Princeton University and Cambridge University. After seven years at Time magazine, he moved to The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1965. A Fellow of the Geological Society of America and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he was awarded in 1999 the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction (Annals of the Former World).