I’m excited to start this new journey with SIG! I’m passionate about developing interventions to improve the well-being of marginalized children and youth. I look forward to the learning opportunities at SIG.
Bio
Yihang Sun is a PhD candidate at the Columbia University School of Social Work. Yi's research centers around the interconnected areas of stigma, mental health, and sexual health among minoritized young people globally. She is particularly passionate about using arts- and community-based participatory approaches to engage minoritized young people in the co-creation of interventions that are grounded in local contexts to address stigma and health disparities. Her current work uses arts-based methods, as well as crowdsourcing to engage youth in conceptualizing and addressing intersectional stigma. Yi draws on diverse qualitative methodologies, with a particular emphasis on ethnographic inquiries, to understand how marginalized communities navigate and make meaning of oppression and discrimination in their everyday lives, as well as their health needs.
Currently, Yi is working with Dr. Alissa Davis on various projects, such as the Face Forward study on using a citizen science approach to optimize an artificial intelligence (AI)-based mental health application for adolescents with facial differences. Yi has years of multicultural practice experience with racial and ethnic minority populations in the US and China.
Yi holds a MSW from the University of Michigan and a BA from Shandong University.