A pianist who codes. An engineer who plays Beethoven.
There is a particular kind of discipline that only piano competition builds. You don't just learn the notes - you learn to trust the hours. Derek Chung logged those hours from a very young age, practicing under Sueanne Metz, competing across the United States and abroad, winning at levels most people never reach. By 18, he had taken the Grand Prize at the Chicago International Music Competition, performed in Sala dei Notari in Perugia, Italy, and stood at Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall. He had also won the MTNA National Senior Piano Competition - the largest music teachers' association in America.
He was also, at that same moment, about to start studying Computer Science.
Stanford's coterminal program is built for people who know where they're going before they arrive. You complete a bachelor's and a master's simultaneously - compressing years of graduate study by treating undergraduate coursework as the foundation, not a detour. Chung entered Stanford in 2018 pursuing a double major in Music and Computer Science, then was admitted to the coterminal MS program in fall 2019. He finished both. His senior piano recital at Braun Music Center's Campbell Recital Hall in May 2022 - a program of Beethoven and others, free admission, open to the public - was not a farewell to music. It was a demonstration that both things were real.
The same rigor that wins a national piano competition is the same rigor that writes reliable software. One practice at a time. One hour at a time. No shortcuts.
On discipline - Chung's approach to craft in both fieldsThe competition circuit and a non-profit built at 18
The Chicago International Music Competition named Chung its Grand Prize winner in 2018. He was 18. The judges weren't alone in noticing - WFMT, Chicago's classical music radio station, profiled him. NPR's From the Top, a national radio program that has launched some of America's most prominent young classical musicians, featured him as part of chamber group Piano Trio Royale.
But the competition wins, stacked as they are, aren't what stands out in retrospect. While still a student, Chung co-founded 88Keys to Cure - a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that uses benefit concerts to raise funds for hospitals and disaster relief. Classical music as a delivery mechanism for something else. That instinct - using a skill to serve a need larger than itself - turns out to be the thread running through everything that followed.
The stages
From Stanford to the company rewriting clinical documentation
After Stanford, Chung joined the engineering world. The path ran through Google - the expected landing point for a Stanford CS graduate - before arriving at Abridge. Abridge is not a typical startup. It was founded in 2018 by Shiv Rao (a cardiologist and CEO trained at Carnegie Mellon), Florian Metze (formerly of CMU's Language Technologies Institute), and Sandeep Konam (robotics master's, CMU). The company's proposition is specific: ambient AI that listens to real patient-clinician conversations and converts them into clinically useful, billable documentation.
It works at Mayo Clinic. It works at Johns Hopkins Medicine. At Kaiser Permanente, Duke Health, Emory Healthcare, UPMC, and more than 150 other health systems. In 2025, Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures led a $300M Series E that valued Abridge at $5.3B. Total funding has crossed $907 million.
The clinical numbers that the company publishes are striking: 78% reduction in cognitive load for clinicians using the platform. 90% of clinicians report being more attentive during patient visits. 53% improvement in professional fulfillment scores. These are not product marketing numbers - they come from health system outcome studies. Chung, as a Senior Software Engineer, is part of the engineering team making those numbers real.
88Keys to Cure and what it means now
When Derek Chung co-founded 88Keys to Cure, the mechanism was concerts and the beneficiaries included hospitals. When he joined Abridge, the mechanism changed - software, AI models, EHR integrations - but the direction didn't. Healthcare is still the end point. Reducing burden on the people who work inside it is still the goal.
The non-profit gave benefit concerts to raise funds for causes including hospital care. The company he now engineers for is trying to give clinicians back the hours they lose to documentation every week - the time they could spend with patients, with family, with themselves. Both projects are about the same thing: what technology (or music) can do when it serves something beyond itself.
The arc
The wins
- Grand Prize - Chicago International Music Competition (2018)
- First Place - MTNA National Senior Piano Competition
- First Place - Arthur Fraser International Piano Competition
- First Place - Alfred MostArts Festival Piano Competition (2016)
- Winner - Future Stars International Competition
- Winner - American Fine Arts International Concerto Competition
- Overall Best Romantic Performance - Los Angeles Young Musician International Piano Competition
- Bronze Medal (x2) - Seattle International Piano Festival Competition
- President's Youth Prize for Best Chopin performance
- Luminarts Cultural Foundation for Classical Music award
- Prize winner - Aloha International Piano Competition
- Prize winner - Bradshaw & Buono International Competition