Grace Chiu

Grace Chiu

Wanna bend some cables?
Get the R package bentcableAR!

PROFESSIONAL PERSONAL

Personal

What keeps me sane: Music
I enjoy most forms of music: choral music (particularly ancient works), classical works, operas, traditional music from the Asian continent, and Latin music including traditional and nuevo flamenco, Brazilian, and Cuban. Most of these I sing, others I play.

Singing is the love of my life.

Click here for a brief bio of my singing career.

While in Canberra, I sang with Oriana Chorale.

At the first ever UWaterloo Statistics and Actuarial Science Idol Contest 2005 to raise funds for United Way, my accompanist (Prof. David Matthews) and I performed an opera aria, and we took home the first prize!

Back in Vancouver, I sang with Elektra Women's Choir from September, 2000 to April, 2004 (when we won the first prize in the Equal Voice Female category at the CBC National Choral Competition). Making it into such an elite choir without any voice training before was by far my biggest achievement, let alone landing on a couple of solos!

(Check out some of the Elektra repertoire here.)

I was also part of an informal quartet -- Untitled 4 until recently. (What's with the geeky name, you ask. How about 2 computing scientists, a mathematician, and a statistician? That spells G-E-E-K-S!) We focussed on early SATB music. We've performed at SFU and a hospital, and also held regular appearances at the West Burnaby United Church, singing to the congregation during Sunday services.

Religion: Darwinism
Note: Darwin's collaborator Alfred Russell Wallace deserved just as much credit as Darwin did.

Spectator Sport: Professional Basketball
Well, it used to be...

I'd been a faithful fan of the Utah Jazz since 1988, but since John Stockton's retirement and Karl Malone's departure to LA, I'd called it quits being a Jazz fan. It was a good ride through all those years, though.

Recreational activities:
I do like playing basketball, but my size (or the lack thereof) is a nuisance. The same applies to almost all other things I like to do: Muay Thai, biking, kayaking, hiking, and working out in general. For some years I enjoyed outdoor rock climbing, although I never went often enough.

The only sport I can do without being hindered by my size is firing shots at wildlife -- with my camera .

Life is but a
Song
to praise the wonder of
Evolution
in the process of which
Man emerged as a
Creature
of
High Intelligence
able to disrupt the balance of
Nature
but
if he tries
has the power to
preserve the diversity of the
World
in which he evolves together
with countless other
Life Forms
with whom he sings along.

QUOTES:
(Taken from bwo's Graffiti Wall:)
"It's as bad as looking up in the sky and seeing a parabola instead of a rainbow," comments Ben (mathematician) as Kuan (med school student) plays with his lamb drumstick and lists the joints and muscles. Grace retorts, "As long as not everything in life is random!" (August 1, 2002)