Current Research and Scholarly Interests
My research interests in public health focus on understanding young people’s health-related risk behavior and developing effective educational interventions to address these risk behaviors. During my doctoral training at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, I studied adolescent co-use of tobacco and cannabis, resulting in twenty first-author publications. Utilizing both qualitative and quantitative methods, my doctoral dissertation focused on two related aspects: 1) patterns and reasons for adolescents’ co-use of vaping nicotine and cannabis, and 2) assessment of school-based interventions to prevent and reduce co-use. Currently, as a postdoctoral scholar studying adolescent and young adult health at Stanford University, I continue to build upon my foundation of knowledge and research skills to design mixed-methods research studies to better understand the specific patterns and predictors of adolescent co-use, which in turn will inform the development and evaluation of evidence-based interventions to prevent and reduce co-use. During my postdoctoral fellowship, my goal is to advance and then apply my knowledge of community-based participatory research (CBPR) to research and program development, including how best involve stakeholders throughout the entire process of developing research projects and interventions. I greatly appreciate the need for evidence-based and community-informed interventions, and I want to contribute to strengthening and developing health prevention education programs through research as an independent investigator. In addition to my research interests, teaching and mentoring students, especially those less represented in science, has been a priority during my education and training as a public health academic. Throughout graduate school, I served as a teaching assistant for multiple undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral-level courses, receiving multiple teaching awards for my work. As a daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, I am the first in my family to graduate from college, so I am excited to advance my lifelong career in academia, research, and mentoring.
