Yin-Ling Irene Wong is a Professor at the Penn School of Social Policy & Practice. She has more than thirty years of experience as a social work practitioner, educator, and researcher, with an interdisciplinary focus that spans the fields of community development, housing and homelessness, and mental health services research.

Professor Wong’s recent research focuses on understanding the cultural manifestation of the stigma of mental illness in Chinese society and developing culture-specific and culturally relevant multi-level interventions to reduce stigma among persons with psychiatric disabilities and their family members. She is passionate about changing public perception of mental illness, a medical condition that affects about 17% of 1.4 billion people in China.

She has developed this mixed-method research agenda with an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural team of researchers from the United States and China. Her goal is to make a positive impact on the well-being of families affected by serious mental illness in China and beyond.