Dr. Chung-Yi Chiu, PH.D., CRC, LPC
Dr. Chung-Yi Chiu completed her Ph.D. in Rehabilitation Counseling Psychology with a minor in Educational Psychology Statistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, her Master’s degree in Occupational Therapy at National Taiwan University, and her Bachelor’s degree in Occupational Therapy at Chang Gung University. Additionally, Dr. Chiu is a Certified Rehabilitation Counselor and a Licensed Professional Counselor. She has conducted several theory/model-driven studies with three main research themes: health promotion, psychosocial adjustment to disability and chronic illness, and social participation. Her overarching research goals are to understand how people with disability and chronic illness (PwDC) live healthy, meaningful, and productive lives; to know why PwDC have barriers and challenges when pursuing physical, mental, and social well-being; and to study how to improve PwDC’s well-being and quality of life.
Vaishnavi is a fourth-year PhD Student in Kinesiology. She has completed her masters in Sport and Exercise Psychology from Loughborough University and has worked as a counselling psychologist in India. Her research interest includes mindfulness based interventions and its effects on stress-resilience. Outside research, she enjoys swimming, and badminton. Currently her goal is to get a paragliding certificate!
Kortney is a first year PhD student in Community Health. She also holds both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Community Health. Her research interests include health across the life course and the social-ecological effects of participatory research and knowledge translation on health exposures and outcomes among minoritized communities and individuals with disabilities and chronic conditions.
Mojtaba is a doctoral student studying Community Health who completed his Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering – Control at University of Tabriz and his Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering – Telecommunications at Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic). His research interests include Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Optimization and Evolutionary Computation, Education, and Behavioral Science. His concentration is on improving quality of life for people with chronic conditions including multiple sclerosis (MS). Outside research, he enjoys good food, good company, good conversations, and good art and literature, not necessarily in this order!
Sajib was a licensed dentist in Bangladesh. He became involved in public health and research with a motivation to have an impact on larger population groups. After working on several community-based health research projects for hard-to-reach and marginalized populations, he started his doctoral study here at UIUC. His research interests include exploring modalities of health service uptake, through technology-based interventions and implementation research.
Jin is a third-year Ph.D. student in Community Health at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research primarily focuses on two areas: (1) Childhood Obesity: We have completed a study examining the prevalence of childhood obesity using various body composition and anthropometric cutoff criteria. The future direction of this research involves employing machine learning techniques to predict childhood obesity and evaluate the efficacy of different machine learning models. (2) Mental Health and Healthy Behaviors: We have investigated the relationships between multiple healthy behaviors and depression in people with and without disabilities. The next phase of this study will explore how these healthy behaviors relate to chronic stress in these populations. Outside research, she loves skating, skiing, dancing, and singing.
Previous Graduate Students
Madina Yerkin- M.S in Community Health
From left to right: Anika Gurbani, Angela Jiang, Adelina Grindeanu, Areesha Ali, Delaney Bach, Quinn Ham, Dr. Chung-Yi Chiu, Hidayah Afzal
Joel Emil, Mei Beechen, Natalya Cheema
Previous Undergraduate Students & Interns
- Pooja Patel
- Parth Trivedi
- Els Ou
- Sam Stabosz
- Saira Hussain
- Maaz Imam
- Pradyumna Chintalapalli
- Joseph Gorman
- Amy Sliwick
- Spencer Wagner