Welcome

I am a PhD student at the NYU Silver School of Social Work. My background bridges empirical research in affective neuroscience with direct clinical social work in inpatient psychiatric settings.

My work focuses on leveraging human-centered technology and natural language processing (NLP) to promote mental health equity, understand cultural help-seeking behaviors, and inform ethically grounded social work practice.

Research Agenda

My doctoral research sits at the intersection of cultural responsiveness, mental health equity, and ethical AI in social work practice. Rather than viewing computational tools strictly through a data science lens, I leverage natural language processing (NLP) as a methodology to uncover help-seeking patterns, address service disparities, and design culturally tuned interventions for marginalized populations.

Key Focus Areas

• Culturally Responsive Suicide Prevention: Utilizing natural language processing (NLP) to examine linguistic and cultural dynamics in Asian American help-seeking behaviors, informing responsive suicide prevention frameworks (e.g., SSWR 2027).
• Ethical & Equitable AI in Mental Health: Investigating algorithmic fairness, data privacy, and the ethical implementation of digital tools to ensure emerging technologies enhance equity rather than exacerbate disparities.
• Inpatient & System-Level Service Equity: Analyzing structural barriers to care in psychiatric settings and designing culturally adapted interventions for underserved groups.

Research & Clinical Experience

• Graduate Research Assistant | Queens Affective Neuroscience Lab (Sept 2024 – Present)
  Contributing to empirical research examining emotional processing, brain-behavior relationships, and cognitive-affective mechanisms.

• Inpatient Psychiatric Social Worker | New York State Office of Mental Health (Nov 2025- Present) Delivered direct clinical care in inpatient psychiatric settings, incorporating creative media and therapeutic group interventions to support patient recovery.

• Research Assistant | Human Language Analysis Lab (HLab), Stony Brook University (May 2022 – Aug 2023)
  Annotated linguistic relationships, authored research prompts and measurement protocols, and assisted with participant recruitment and study execution for computational language projects.

• Research Assistant | World Trade Center Personality and Health Project, Stony Brook University (Apr 2022 – Aug 2022)
  Executed ETL data cleaning pipelines and monitored long-term mental and physical health trajectories of 9/11 first responders.

Beyond Academia

Outside of research and clinical work, I love spending time outdoors, whether hiking, camping, or kayaking with my two poodles, Phoebe and Powder. I am also passionate about wildlife rehabilitation and local bird rescue, caring for my three resident birds at home: Hope, Happy, and Blue.

Out on the water with Phoebe and Powder.

Contact Information

• Email: xl6461@nyu.edu
• Institution: NYU Silver School of Social Work
• Location: New York, NY