Claire Venice Hong is a rising senior at Pitzer College in Southern California, majoring in psychology. As an international student from Taiwan, her firsthand experiences in acculturation have helped her develop an interest in how sociocultural contexts interact with biological and cognitive processes. Through her work experience at the Berger Institute for Individual and Social Development at Claremont Mckenna College, she is also passionate and experienced in research on adolescent determinants of health. This summer, she worked under the supervision of Dr. Reuben Robbins and his team to study the neurocognitive effects of perinatal HIV on adolescents across African and Asian nations. Her primary responsibilities included contributing to a new research grant investigating neurocognitive and mental health outcomes of HIV-positive adolescents in Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as conducting a literature review for the grant. Outside of this project, she was also responsible for the scoring and labeling of neuropsychological assessments from the lab’s other ongoing studies on adolescent HIV.
Claire Hong has gained many connections and new skills as a result of working at the Columbia-WHO Center for Global Mental Health. With encouragement from peers and mentors from the institute, she is looking to apply for MPH programs in the fall of 2024 and will either pursue epidemiology or global health as her concentration. In the future, Claire would like to return to her hometown, Taipei City, where she can be involved in adolescent health interventions to give back to her community with what she has learned abroad.