Yu Sun Chung, Ph.D.

Dr. Chung received the Ph.D. In Cognitive Psychology from Washington University in St. Louis. Her academic journey began as a master-level clinician, driven by a desire to develop effective treatments and prevention strategies for psychopathology. Before she came to the USA, she got her master's degree in clinical psychology from Korea University, located in Seoul, South Korea. During her time in South Korea, she conducted Cognitive Behavioral Group Therapy sessions for people with schizophrenia and social phobia. Recognizing the critical need to understand neural mechanisms underlying the psychopathology, Dr. Chung focused her graduate research on the neural mechanisms of reward processing and anhedonia both in healthy adults and schizophrenia using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging. She further expanded her research to understand both typical and atypical adolescent develop using multimodal neuroimaging tools including event-related potentials along with hormone and experimental methods at Duke University and the Olin Neuropsychiatry Research Center. 

Her current research interests are to determine how pubertal development influences adolescents' reward-based decision making and immune function with a focus on sex differences.