I was born in Toronto, Canada. As early as I can remember, I wanted to be a journalist. After graduating from McGill University, I took a crash course in Mandarin, flew to Beijing and started my journalism career.

Over the next two years, I wrote a range of stories from the plight of abandoned Chinese baby girls to travelling on the Karakoram Highway from China to Pakistan.

In the spring of 1989, I reported on the Tiananmen Square demonstrations and massacre.

After I left China (martial law made reporting very difficult), I did my Masters at the Columbia Journalism School in New York. I then moved to the UK and my writing appeared in the Financial Times, The Economist and The Wall Street Journal.

I was then appointed a financial news producer for CNN in London.

In subsequent years, I was a Parent Governor Representative for the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. I also did an MA in Creative Writing - something I really enjoyed.

In 2009 I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS). In hopes of making sense of such an unpredictable disease, I began writing about it for the highly-respected ​Barts MS Blog linked to Queen Mary, University of London.

I also co-authored articles which have been published in The BMJ, Annals of Neurology, Neurology and Nature Reviews Neurology.

In 2021, I was appointed Honorary Research Fellow at the Wolfson Institute of Population Health at Queen Mary.

Over the years, I have been fortunate to be able to support MS research and other philanthropic projects through my family foundation in Canada.

I live in London with my husband and we have two adult children.

I am currently on Ocrevus, my third disease modifying therapy to treat my MS.