Grace Kong, PhD

Grace Kong, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry. She uses multi-methods (e.g., social media analysis, qualitative focus groups, quantitative surveys) to understand tobacco use behaviors and marketing to inform intervention development and policies to prevent youth and young adult tobacco use. Dr. Kong leads an NIH and FDA-funded R01 research project that examines diverse social media platforms to understand tobacco use trends and marketing. Fellows will gain a deep understanding of using social media data to 1) develop research questions that will inform the development of youth and young adult-focused tobacco interventions and policies; 2) conduct content analysis of social media data which includes human coding and advanced methods, such as supervised machine learning; 3) work in a multi-disciplinary team of computational and behavioral scientists; and 4) apply knowledge learned from social media analysis to human behaviors using surveys and focus groups.