Many of you may remember Dr. Michael Ium, who recently gave a talk for the Lama Yeshe Ling community. A recording of this talk can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky-27b0kcGk
An “Urgent Support for Michael’s Mom” Go Fund Me has been established for donations towards the enormous financial burdens at this time.
Details and updates are available at:
https://gofund.me/58a36491
Dr. Michael Ium (1984-2025)
It is with great sadness that we report the passing of Dr. Michael Ium. Michael Ium was born and raised in Toronto as the child of South Korean immigrants. He studied psychology at the University of Toronto, earning a BA in 2008. Becoming disillusioned with his subsequent career as a professional poker player, he wrote, “As a backpacker going through a quarter-life crisis, my interest in Tibetan Buddhism and the Geluk tradition was sparked by a ten-day ‘Discovering Buddhism’ retreat at Kopan Monastery [in Nepal] in 2011.” It was there that he learned about Maitripa College in Portland, Oregon, and enrolled that fall.
Michael completed a Master of Arts in Buddhist Studies at Maitripa College, in 2014. He then received a prestigious Chancellor’s Fellowship and entered the PhD program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He won a 2020 International Dissertation Research Grant from the American Academy of Religion, studying for over a year in India, and completed his PhD in 2023 with a dissertation entitled “The Early History of Ganden Monastery and the Construction of the Geluk Tradition,” which illuminated understudied aspects of the early Geluk tradition of Tibetan Buddhism and its founder, Tsongkhapa through the lens of the history of its first great monastery, Ganden. Michael then returned to his alma mater, the University of Toronto, as the first postdoctoral fellow in both the Department for the Study of Religion and the Ho Centre for Buddhist Studies. A brilliant scholar with a bright future, his career contributions, cut short by his untimely death, are a loss to us all.
Michael was the co-editor of the Canadian Journal of Buddhist Studies and actively presented his research at prominent academic conferences, including meetings of the American Academy of Religion, the International Association of Tibetan Studies, the International Seminar of Young Tibetologists, and the International Association of Buddhist Studies. He was part of a translation group at UCSB working on sūtra translations for the 84000 Project and published several scholarly articles. He had recently taken up a position in Vienna as a postdoctoral fellow at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Institute for the Cultural and Intellectual History of Asia, working on material related to Tibetan Buddhist scholasticism from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. On April 1, 2025, while delivering a talk in Vienna, Michael experienced a sudden, and subsequently fatal, cardiac event. He passed away on April 9.
Sharing collegiality, particularly over a good meal, was always a highlight for Michael at any gathering. He made friends everywhere with his warmth, humor, integrity, and keen intellectual curiosity. He will be deeply missed by his friends, family, and colleagues around the world.