Kathy Trang

In my career, I aim to improve the prognosis and treatment strategies for non-communicable diseases by delivering innovative, patient-centered health solutions to low-resource settings where they are most needed worldwide. I first matriculated to California State University, Los Angeles, as a psychology and biology dual major when I was 14; and spent several years researching the genetic and hormonal factors contributing to sex differences in disease risk and outcome. In 2014, I entered the biological anthropology PhD program at Emory University.

During my Ph.D., I have investigated how HIV amplifies the effect of trauma on PTSD symptomatology and neurobiology, using locally adapted measures of mental health and robust psychophysiological measures of stress reactivity, in Hanoi, Vietnam. Translating from clinic-based indicators into the flow of everyday life, I employed ambulatory methods (EMA, wearable tech) to understand how trauma and HIV reconfigured people’s lifeworlds and influenced real-time risk-taking behaviors and perceptions of self and other. In illustrating these biosocial dynamics of trauma, my work aims to identify the where-when-whom of structural and psychosocial vulnerability.

Moving forward (starting January 2021), I will starting a postdoc at Yale where I will be working on a birth cohort study among Rohingya refugees in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, with the Global TIES team at NYU to elucidate the impact of parental trauma exposure on child developmental outcomes. Of continued intereset to me is the use of novel technologies, including ambulatory neuroscience methods (fNIRS), in characterizing the etiology and phenomenology of trauma-related psychopathology and differential treatment outcomes in low-resourced settings.