The Gift of Resilience

In thinking about how she got to where she is now, Linh Luong ’20 boils it down to one word: resilience. From immigrating to La Crosse, Wis., from Vietnam at 10 years old, to navigating a serious new health condition during a pandemic, to bouncing back from a layoff in late 2025, Linh says, “I’ve definitely built up a lot of resilience.” 

Now she’s part of a team that gives others their best chance to bounce back, too, and lead better, longer lives. 

Linh Luong ’20

Linh entered Luther planning to pursue medical school. One of Luther’s first neuroscience graduates, she conducted summer research projects with professor Colin Betts ’93 in her anthropology minor and professor Kristy Gould in neuroscience. She found that she really loved research and decided to take a gap year to think harder about pursuing medical school versus earning an advanced degree in a research-based area.

Halfway through her gap year, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Linh suddenly developed a seizure disorder. While it’s largely under control now, it wreaked a lot of havoc during a time when she was trying to make life-altering decisions.

A new question confronted her: Could she handle an academic program alongside her new condition? To test the waters, she enrolled in a master’s degree in biological sciences at the University of Minnesota. In addition to her love of neuroscience, she had an interest in physics and engineering and liked that the degree was flexible. 

She took to the program extremely well. She spent her first semester working in a neuroscience lab focused on seizure control in epilepsy and eventually carved out a path for herself in quality engineering in the medical device sector. 

Quality engineering, she says, “is a culmination of my passion for medicine, science, innovation, and helping people.”

Now, as a quality engineer at Forj Medical (previously Minnetronix) in St. Paul, Minn., Linh helps develop medical equipment of all kinds, from devices that get implanted in a patient’s body to surgical equipment used in operating rooms. In her role, she looks carefully at each element of a new device and how those elements work together, as well as safety and policy compliance for the different continents where a device will be used. She partners with her team to develop testing protocols and also conducts audits to make sure that her team is holding all parts of the company accountable. 

“At the end of the day,” she says, “I want to make sure that the things that we make for patients will be safe and improve their lives.”