Alison Hwong

As of 2024, Alison Hwong is a Psychiatry Fellow at the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences. At Yale, Alison was an MD/PhD student in Health Policy-Medical Sociology. She first became interested in social networks through research in mental health policy.

After college, she spent a year doing research in Geel, Belgium, arguably the oldest mental health treatment community in the world. This town resisted the institutionalizing movement in psychiatry, housing people with mental illness (who are called “boarders”) in homes around the village.

Since starting medical and graduate school, she has become interested in social networks as vehicles for public health interventions. How can our understanding of social networks inform planning and implementation of health programs and the spread of health information?