San Francisco Bay Area

The San Francisco Bay Area is one of the most culturally diverse regions in the United States. This diversity provides unique opportunities to increase current understanding of the complex range of factors that affect health and wellness of individuals and communities.

WELL For Life offers the ideal setting to generate novel questions that can be tested at the population level to build the evidence-base of wellness. WELL for Life is inviting people from the San Francisco Bay Area to join us in this exciting research.

Hangzhou, China

WELL-China is a long-term collaboration in the historic Chinese city of Hangzhou that includes Zhejiang University researchers and governmental partners. As the world's most populous country, China carries a growing burden of chronic disease, especially heart disease, cancer and stroke. Going beyond other population studies, WELL-China will rigorously explore the interaction between wellbeing, lifestyle behaviors, human function, and chronic disease.

New Taipei City, Taiwan

Collaborating with Fu Jen University, WELL-Taiwan focuses on collecting biological specimens that will be used to identify and explore biomarkers of wellness. WELL-Taiwan provides a platform for community-based interventions to identify effective strategies for promoting improved wellness at individual and population levels. The data will provide pioneering insights into the complex interplay between economic growth, health behaviors, wellness and chronic disease outcomes.

Changhua, Taiwan

National Taiwan University (NTU) joined the WELL Global Family to launch WELL Taiwan 2 to recruit an additional 10,000 individuals for the study. Professor Chang-Chuan Chan, Dean of the School of Public Health, will serve as Principal Investigator. WELL Taiwan 2 will recruit subjects in the central part of Taiwan throughout 2020 and 2021, leveraging infrastructure and ongoing cohorts at the NTU Center for Population Health. Stanford Professor Ann Hsing, Principal Investigator of WELL Taiwan 2, and Dr. Cathy Heaney conducted a successful site visit in October 2019.

Singapore

As the third site of the WELL Asia WELL For Life initiative, WELL-Singapore is a collaboration with the National University of Singapore through its Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health (SSHSPH).

WELL-Singapore will survey and collect biological specimen from 10,000 individuals for the WELL for Life initiative through the follow-up of the Multiethnic Cohort (MEC), one of SSHSPH's prospective cohort studies. This offers an unprecedented opportunity to explore the factors that contribute to wellness amongst its Southeast-Asian Chinese, Indian and Malay ethnic groups, as well as the factors differentiating its population and those of Taiwan, China and the San Francisco Bay Area.

The MEC started in 2013 with the aim to study lifestyle, physiological and genetic risk factors in the development of chronic diseases prevalent in Singapore. The exploration of what creates or enhances wellness is anticipated to provide fresh perspectives and insights in the betterment of population health.

Bangkok, Thailand

WELL Thailand joined the WELL family in 2019. Stanford WELL is collaborating with a team at Chulalongkorn University led by Principal Investigator Dr. Nipat Pichayayothin. WELL Thailand has completed qualitative interviews of 50 individuals in an effort to illuminate the nature of well-being among people residing in Bangkok. The goal is to create a WELL Thailand flower of domains and pusue quantitative interviews of 2,000 participants in 2020. We welcome WELL Thailand to the Global WELL family!