Keywords
Pediatric, Mental Health, Health Disparities, Early Childhood Health and Development, Prevention, Implementation Research, Global Public Health
Summary
I am an Associate Professor of Population Health and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at NYU School of Medicine, specializing in child development, psychiatric epidemiology, prevention, implementation, and global public health research. I am a Principal investigator and Co-investigator on numerous NIH and Foundation funded child development and mental health implementation research projects in international contexts. My research interests are influenced by my own ethnic background and living experiences in collectivistic and individualistic cultures, and have been centered on health equity and mental health promotion in underserved child populations. These include investigating patterns and mechanisms of child mental health disparities; testing cost-effective family- and system-level approaches of preventive strategies to address child mental health disparities; and studying strategies for broader evidence-based program dissemination and implementation in diverse populations and contexts.
My current research efforts focus on child mental/behavioral health implementation and epidemiological research both in low-and middle-income countries (LMICs) and in the US. For the research in LMICs, I lead global implementation of ParentCorps, a population-level family-centered, school- based intervention that aims to attenuate the adverse effects of poverty on child development, in Uganda and Nepal. I partner with faculty and mental health professionals from academic institutions, governmental and community stakeholders to test task-shifting and other potential cost-efficient strategies to bring ParentCorps to low-resource Uganda and Nepal schools, as well as to evaluate the impact of intervention on home and community violence, adults’ utilization of evidence-based parenting strategies, and child mental health and development. Through these projects, we have also built research, mental health, and early childhood service system capacity in LMICs. In addition to ParentCorps implementation, I am also a Co-Investigator of the African Center for Collaborative Child Mental Health Implementation Research (an NIMH funded U19 Center grant) that aims to build capacity for evidence-based child behavioral health policy and implementation research in Uganda, Ghana, and Kenya. In this project, I collaborate with many child mental health researchers and stakeholders to develop a series of epidemiological and implementation studies to inform intervention service and policy development in LMICs.
For my US-focused research, I previously led several projects that investigated patterns of child mental health disparities, service needs, and mechanisms for disparities in diverse Asian American populations in comparison to African American and Latino children. My current efforts in Asian American research focus on implementation strategy development (e.g., knowledge dissemination, mHealth, collaboration strategies) to broaden child mental health knowledge dissemination and evidence-based intervention utilization in diverse community-based organizations and pediatric service settings where Asian American families are most likely to seek for services.
Furthermore, in the Center for Early Childhood Health and Development (CEHD), I served as co-investigator on several projects that study scale-up
strategies and impacts of ParentCorps in diverse US populations and Pre-K program contexts, and investigate the roles of culture, family, school and neighborhood contexts on Black and Latino youths’ development.I have a BS in Clinical Psychology from Kaohsiung Medical College in Taiwan, an MA and PhD in Applied Developmental Psychology from University of Maryland, Baltimore, and an MPH in Global Health Policy and Management from New York University. I completed a postdoctoral training in statistic/quantitative analyses and psychiatric epidemiology at the NYU Child Study Center. I also completed an Implementation Research Fellowship from the NIH Implementation Research Institute and a Global mHealth scholar training from NIH Fogarty International Center mHealth Research Training Institute.
