Editing Irene Uchida (section)

==Education==

Irene's parents owned two bookstores, so it is fitting that after high school she went on to study English literature at the University of British Columbia. Her education was interrupted, however, after she travelled with her mother and sisters to Japan in 1941. She returned on the last ship back to Canada before Pearl Harbor, her mother and sisters remaining in Japan. After Pearl Harbor, intense anti-Japanese bias led Canada to enact the [[War Measures Act]] in February 1942. This led to the forced removal and incarceration of over 20,000 Japanese Canadians, including Irene and her family who were incarcerated at a Canadian concentration camp at Christina Lake, British Columbia.

While incarcerated at camp, Irene was asked to be the principal of a school for children of internees because of her university education. After her father chose to return to his wife in Japan an exchange for Allied prisoners of war, Irene accepted the support of the United Church, which offered her a place to stay and encouraged her to finish her degree at the University of Toronto. Uchida earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1946, intending to continue her education by getting a master's degree in social work.

The support and encouragement of one of her professors, Norma Ford Walker, head of the Department of Zoology but soon to become the director of a newly formed Department of Genetics at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, however, influenced Uchida to instead pursue the field of human genetics. In 1951 she completed her PhD in zoology.<ref name = "Rosen_1986">{{cite journal | vauthors = Rosen R | title = "Role of mathematical modeling in protocol formulation in cancer chemotherapy" | journal = Cancer Treatment Reports | volume = 70 | issue = 12 | pages = 1461–2 | date = December 1986 | pmc = 3791260 | doi = 10.1016/j.ajhg.2013.09.005 | pmid = 3791260 }}</ref>