Badger bred, Wolverine raised, Windy-City built, and Motor-City refined
As a child, whenever someone asked, “Where are you from?” I felt unsure what to say. “Wisconsin” was often met with an uncertain pause, whereas “Korea” received an assured nod—both reminders that the question implicitly marked me as “other.” Growing up, I did not yet have the words for what I was experiencing, just a persistent sense of tension. In college, I began to formalize my understanding of this “otherness” as marginalization shaped by systemic inequality. After graduation, this understanding broadened when I worked in communities affected by high rates of poverty and gun violence; it became clear that the privilege of stepping back from conscious engagement with systemic inequality is denied to those most affected. Motivated by these experiences and my longstanding interest in brain development, I pursued a career path that blends passion and profession.
My doctoral journey has been both intellectual and personal. I have grappled with how my lived experiences shape my epistemological assumptions, which in turn influence the knowledge I produce. Reflecting on how my intersectionality encompasses both privilege and oppression has shown me that integrating multiple perspectives is essential for conducting research that is scientifically rigorous and contextually relevant, producing insights that are responsive to the lived realities of the communities most affected.
My scholarship crosses disciplinary boundaries, which includes bridging social work and developmental neuroscience to address behavioral and mental health disparities among populations disproportionately affected by systemic inequality. Neuroscience has yielded important insights, including identifying neural correlates of behavioral and mental health challenges, demonstrating the effectiveness of clinical interventions, and clarifying how early experiences shape developmental trajectories. Yet its integration into social work remains limited. While social work emphasizes a biopsychosocial model, the biological component is often underemphasized, partly because biomedical frameworks are viewed with caution as reductionist or deficit-oriented, a narrative that disproportionately affects marginalized populations. Thus, through interdisciplinary training, my work seeks to integrate strengths-based, phenomenologically-informed perspectives into neuroscience research, situating biological evidence within relational and sociocultural contexts where rigor meets relevance.
My long-term goal is to build a program of research that generates empirical evidence to strengthen direct social work practice and ultimately advance behavioral and mental health equity.
Feel free to contact me if you’d like to connect further: hshong [at] umich.edu