Badger bred, Wolverine raised, Windy-City built, and Motor-City refined
As a child, when 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 to describe what I was experiencing, only a persistent sense of uneasiness. In college, I began to understand this “otherness” as a form of marginalization shaped by systemic inequality. After college, this understanding deepened through my work in communities affected by poverty and gun violence. I came to recognize that the privilege of stepping back from systemic inequality is often unavailable to those most affected by it. At the same time, I saw how individuals draw on relational strengths and community assets to navigate challenges and demonstrate resilience. Together with my longstanding interest in brain development, these experiences led me to ask how developmental processes interact with the relational and sociocultural contexts in which people live.
My doctoral journey has been both intellectual and personal. I have become increasingly aware of how my lived experiences shape my epistemological assumptions, which in turn influence the knowledge I produce. Reflecting on the intersection of my privilege and oppression has shown me the need to integrate multiple perspectives in understanding how risk and resilience are shaped across development. My doctoral training also led me to grapple with a broader tension in behavioral and mental health research: among populations impacted by systemic inequality, lived experiences can be minimized or even pathologized when behavioral and neural underpinnings of risk and resilience are examined in isolation from the relational processes and sociocultural contexts in which they unfold.
My scholarship responds to this challenge by integrating social work, developmental psychology, neuroscience, and data science to examine developmental trajectories of behavioral and mental health, particularly among populations disproportionately affected by systemic inequality. I seek to understand how behavioral and neural mechanisms, relational processes, and sociocultural contexts operate together and shape heterogeneous patterns of risk and resilience. Drawing on multimodal, mixed-method approaches, I examine risk and resilience within and across interconnected systems while remaining attentive to individuals’ lived experiences. Ultimately, I aim to translate these empirical insights into prevention and intervention efforts and advance behavioral and mental health equity. In doing so, I seek to situate my scholarship at the intersection of rigor and relevance.
Feel free to contact me if you’d like to connect further: hshong [at] umich.edu