Rose Zhang debut makes history by winning her first professional golf tournament

Rose Zhang just won her first pro tourney but she's worried about her exams at Stanford.

Rose Zhang just turned pro and on Sunday she became the first player to win an LPGA tournament in her professional debut in 72 years. 

No one was surprised to see the former Stanford star, Rose Zhang, holding the Mizuho Americas Open trophy on Sunday at Liberty National Golf Club. But few, even Zhang herself, expected success to come this early.

"Answer is no," Zhang said when asked if she expected to win in her pro debut. "I honestly didn't even expect to make the cut and the reason why I say this is because I don't think about my expectations a lot. I think about playing the golf course. I think about trying to shoot the best score that I can.

"Obviously, I have frustrations, disappointments with my game, but I never once think about where I finish, where I should finish, et cetera. The expectation for me winning did not even cross my mind. I was just playing my game. I was having a good time out there. This is the game that I love, and I'm so thankful to be a professional doing it now."

"I want to keep on doing better and better," said Zhang. "So we'll be seeing what I do in the future. As of now, I'm just soaking it all in."

At 20-years old, Zhang already has a pretty good resume: Twelve wins at Stanford University, two national championships, an Augusta National Women's Amateur title, a US Girls' Junior win, and a U.S. Women's Amateur victory are great forecasters for LPGA Tour success. 

As she drinks in the moment, the Stanford student will be celebrating this momentous occasion, but Zhang also has something else on her mind that might end up being a little more stressful than winning her first pro event…final exams.

"I have no idea what I'm going to do with that. I've got an essay due, pset due for CS," she said. "We'll figure that out. I'm also moving on the 13th, so I have a busy week ahead of me, and that's not golf related."

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Chinese billionaire paid $6.5 million to get daughter into Stanford

The Chinese family who allegedly paid $6.5 million to get their daughter into Stanford University has been identified.

The billionaire family of former sophomore Yusi Zhao paid the largest amount of money in the college admissions scandal.

Yusi Zhao's father, Tao Zhao, is the chairman and co-founder of the pharmaceutical company Shandong Buchang, based in Heze, China.

The Zhao's -- parents or daughter -- have not been charged, according to the Los Angeles Times. They were referred to the admissions scam's ringleader, William Rick Singer, by an employee at Morgan Stanley, the source said.

Dozens of families have been connected to the scandal, including actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin.

Yusi Zhao reportedly left her on-campus residence at the end of March. Her profile has been deleted from the campus directory on April 10. A declared East Asian Studies major, Yusi was a member of Stanford’s Forum for American-Chinese Exchange (FACES), and had planned to attend Stanford’s Bing Overseas Studies Program’s inaugural Hong Kong program in fall 2019, according to the Stanford Daily.

Stanford spokespeople said they are unable to confirm or deny whether Yusi has been expelled due to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974.

In order to get Yusi Zhao into Stanford, Singer allegedly created a fake bio of her as a competitive sailing athlete in order to get her admitted with the cooperation of the sailing coach. She was not offered an athletic scholarship.

Singer promised to donate $500,000 to the Stanford sailing program over the course of several years.

Former Stanford sailing head coach John Vandemoer pleaded guilty to racketeering in collaboration with Singer’s fraudulent charity. Both Vandemoer and his attorney Robert Fisher declined to comment to the Stanford Daily.

The second largest sum paid to Singer -- $1.2 million -- was also paid by a Chinese family to get their daughter into Yale. The family of former student Sherry Guo was also not charged.

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Facebook couple commit $3 billion for bold medical initiative

Dr. Priscilla Chan appeared on the Today Show to explain the plan to spend $3 billion to advance medical research.

THREE UNIVERSITIES in the San Francisco Bay Area are coming together to launch a biomedical science center funded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and pediatrician Priscilla Chan, his wife. The $600 million center, known as the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, is the first investment made by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a philanthropic company created last year to improve education and cure disease, among other goals. Researchers at UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco and Stanford University, will work together at the center, which will be located on UCSF's campus.

Over the next decade, Chan says the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will invest $3 billion in a sweeping effort to cure all diseases in the lifetime of today’s children.

“We are at the limit of our ability to alleviate suffering,” Chan said Thursday morning at an event in San Francisco. “We want to push back at that boundary.”

Chan and Zuckerberg have been meeting with scientists, doctors, and engineers in hopes of “curing, preventing, or managing all diseases in our children’s lifetime.” In her opening statement at the event, Chan said, “Mark and I believe this goal is possible ... And after we talked with a lot of top scientists, we realized that they do too.”

"Medicine has only been a modern science for about a century, and we've made incredible progress so far. Life expectancy has increased by 1/4 of a year per year since then, and if we only continue this trend, the average will reach 100 around the end of this century," said Zuckerberg on his Facebook page.

"Today, just four kinds of diseases cause the majority of deaths. We can make progress on all of them with the right technology.

"Throughout history, most scientific breakthroughs have been preceded by the invention of new tools to help us see problems in new ways -- like the telescope, the microscope and DNA sequencing.

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"It's not hard to imagine the modern tools required to accelerate breakthroughs in today's four major disease areas. So we're going to focus on bringing scientists and engineers together to build these new tools and technologies.

In 2015, Chan and Zuckerberg pledged in an open letter to their newborn daughter to donate 99 percent of their Facebook shares during their lives for charitable purposes. “Partnering with experts,” they wrote, “is more effective for the mission than trying to lead efforts ourselves.”

The result is the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, saying it would give as much as $45 billion to charity over the course of their lifetimes.

In introducing the broader $3 billion science initiative, Chan, the daughter of ethnic Chinese refugees who fled Vietnam in the 1970s, set the stage, sometimes tearfully, by sharing her personal insights as a pediatrician who has had to deliver such tragic news as telling families their child has leukemia, or that the hospital could not resuscitate their child.

“We want to dramatically improve every life in Max’s generation,” Chan said, referring to the couple’s 10-month-old daughter, Maxima, whose birth last year inspired a commitment from Chan and Zuckerberg to donate 99 percent of their Facebook shares over their lives toward improving education and health prospects for this and future generations.

“This doesn’t mean no one will get sick,” said Chan. “But it does mean that our children and their children should get sick a lot less.”

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