PROJECT: Technology-based interventions to facilitate Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) prevention, predict IPV victimization using social media data, and inform IPV help-seeking strategies that are specifically tailored for gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men.

Chenglin Hong, MSW, MPH, is a third-year PhD student in Social Welfare at UCLA. His research interests focus on reducing health disparities among sexual and gender minorities, with a particular focus on HIV prevention and sexual/mental health promotion among gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (GBMSM).

As a trained social worker, his work seeks to understand the intersections between intimate partner violence, stigma, and sexual and mental health outcomes with the aim of developing interventions that disrupt the adverse pathways among these domains. He is particularly interested in developing, testing, and evaluating technology-based interventions for health promotion and utilizing data science approaches (e.g., machine learning/natural language processing) to predict health outcomes using social media data.

Since he started his PhD in 2020, Hong has published over 17 peer-reviewed articles in top-tier journals, including AIDS and Behavior, AIDS Patient Care and STDs, Journal of Medical Internet Research, among others. His research has been presented at national and international academic conferences such as the International AIDS Conference, American Public Health Association Conference, and Society for Social Work Research Conference.