About Me

I am a third-year PhD student in Social Welfare at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy & Practice. I study how mental health systems can be designed, implemented, and improved to promote recovery and equitable access to care. My work focuses on peer support services, help-seeking and service utilization, mental health equity among Asian and immigrant communities, and the implementation of innovative models of care.

These questions grew out of my training as a mental health social worker in Korea, where I saw how often a diagnosis came to define a person’s whole life and how rarely those living with mental illness were asked what recovery should mean to them. Too often the system had little to offer them, in part because it was built without the people it was meant to serve. My doctoral work carries these concerns in new directions. I treat racial and cultural context as part of what mental health care is, not an add-on to it, and I put lived experience and peer leadership at the center of how care gets designed. I have also turned to computational methods that let me ask different questions of large-scale data.

Methodologically, I use quantitative, computational, and mixed-methods approaches, including machine learning, natural language processing, structural equation modeling, multilevel modeling, and text-as-data methods. I use these tools to generate evidence that informs mental health policy, service delivery, and implementation.