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Researcher Profiles
Ann H. Kim (Department of Sociology, York University)
Ann H. Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
She joined York in 2006 after completing her doctorate in Sociology at Brown University in 2005, where she was also a Population Studies and Training Center (PSTC) trainee, and after working as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto. She holds an Honours BA (with high distinction) and an MSW from the University of Toronto. Before pursuing doctoral studies, Ann spent several years in the non-profit sector, working internationally -- Toronto, Ottawa, Sydney (Australia) and London (UK).
Ann's research is largely motivated by questions related to the immigrant and ethnic integration process, and how this is shaped by social, economic and political conditions and institutions in places of origin and destination, social networks and social capital, families, culture, ethnic and racial communities, human capital and motivation, and the context of migration - including immigration policies and international relations.
A second area of research considers spatial manifestations of urban inequality and consequences for individuals, families and communities. Included in this area are topics such as residential patterns and residential segregation or residential integration, internal migration, residential mobility and homeownership, and neighbourhoods.
Eunjung Lee (Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto)
As a clinician in community social services and mental health agencies for over 15 years, Dr. Lee has valuable experience and resources in social work practice across different settings and diverse populations. She was also trained in the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Program (PPTP) at the Western Branch of Canadian Psychoanalytic Society for her in-depth clinical skills and knowledge as well as close observation of human development through an intensive infant observation seminar.
Dr. Lee is originally from South Korea where she earned her BA and MA in Social Work and worked as a social worker at a community welfare agency. Prior to immigrating to Canada, she received her MSW from the University of Connecticut and worked as a child and family clinical consultant in a welfare-to-work transition program in Connecticut.
Her primary research interest is in bridging realms of psychotherapy and cultural studies as well as clinical practice and process research in social work. Teaching interests are in clinical practice with individuals and families, children and adolescents, and mental health practice.
Her research areas included: cultural competencies; clinical practice; psychotherapy process research; immigration and refugees; transnationalism; training and supervision.
Samuel Noh (Department of Psychiatry, University of Toronto)
Dr. Noh explores mental health issues among immigrants as well as racial and ethnic minority groups to determine why some people cope better than others. His research focuses on the critical issues of understanding health disparities by studying the ways social status and context exert effects as major determinants of health and health disparities.
His most recent publications report the first comprehensive analysis of racial/ethnic distribution of depression in the Canadian population, psychosocial processes of discrimination and mental health, confluence of race, family and neighbourhood ecology on adolescent depression, and mental health service use among immigrants in Toronto.
Dr. Noh is currently studying the dynamics and processes that explain how ascribed social status (e.g., sex, race, and ethnicity) and achieved social status (e.g., education, occupation, and poverty), ecological context (e.g., community social pathology or poverty, public attitudes, and health policy) and public and personal stigma of mental illness contribute to the onset of mental disorders.
Wansoo Park (School of Social Work, University of Windsor )
Wansoo Park is an Assistant Professor at the School of Social Work, University of Windsor. She formerly taught at the School of Social Work, Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia.
As a community practitioner, she has worked to promote health and mental health within Asian immigrant communities through programme development, education and advocacy in the United States. Her primary interest areas in both practice and research include finding ways to increase accessibility of the mainstream health and mental health services to immigrant populations across life span.
Dr. Park’s most recent research focus is a pilot project which investigates factors affecting the psychological well-being of older Korean American women with chronic health conditions. She plans to expand this project to include Asian immigrants living in Canada. Dr. Park has also been involved in various programme evaluation projects including integrated access and visitation programme for non-custodial parents in Atlanta, the Grady senior post hospitalization survey project, and Georgia women’s residential ‘Ready for Work’ substance abuse treatment programs.
She has taught research, programme evaluation, health and social work, meeting human needs through social welfare, and field integrative seminar courses.
Her research areas include: health communication; health promotion; mental health; adolescents; gerontology; cultural competence; acculturation and programme evaluation.
Sung Hyun Yun (School of Social Work, University of Windsor)
Sung Hyun Yun is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Windsor. He has taught in the areas of generalist social work practice, research, and abuse/violence in the family and community.
As a practitioner with pro-feminist perspectives, he has worked for prevention and intervention of interpersonal violence, sexual assaults, and gender-based oppression in the refugee and immigrant communities in Atlanta, Georgia. He created the first Korean-speaking batterer intervention programme (ADAM: Against Domestic Abuse for Men; Center for Pan Asian Community Services, Inc.) in the southeast United States and provided Family Violence Intervention Program (FVIP) to the refugee and immigrant population for six years in Atlanta, Georgia. He has also worked as a Georgia licensed instructor at a local DUI and Risk Reduction Prevention programme.
His dissertation work focused on developing an instrument that measures batterers’ cognition related to responsibility for their violent behaviour toward the intimate.
His research areas include: Intimate partner violence; batterer intervention programmes; alcohol/substance abuse and risk-reduction programmes; cross-cultural studies and scale development.
Jose Itzigsohn (Department of Sociology, Brown University )
Dr. Itzigsohn’s work focuses on two areas. The first one is identity and group formation, with a focus on processes of racialization, and ethnic and nation formation. He is currently conducting research on the racial and ethnic identity formation among first and second generation Dominican immigrants, on the formation of Latino/a communities and identities, and on the formation of immigrant transnational communities. He is also conducting comparative research on the forms of nationalism in Latin America.
His second area of interest is the political economy of inequality. He has conducted research on labor markets and the informal economy in Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic. Currently, he is working on the employment strategies and trajectories of Latin American immigrants in the United States. He is also studying the recuperated factories in Argentina (factories that have been taken over by workers who run them as workers owned cooperatives) assessing the conditions that sustain collective action and the organizational forms of the workers owned factories.
He works within the world-system theoretical paradigm, but is interested in the local variations within the world economic and political systems. He investigates how local and regional institutional forms and identity formation processes develop and interact with world-systemic trends.
His role in the project is to use his experience as a researcher in the field of transnational migration to advise the investigators on how to think through and research issues of transnational migration. This includes participating in discussions with the investigators on questions of conceptualization, operationalization and measurement of transnationalism for the purpose of the design of the reasearch instrument and also will entail discussing with the investigators ways to analyze the results of the project.
Dr. Itzigsohn is the author of Developing Poverty (Penn State Press, 2000) and of numerous articles published in journals such as Social Forces, International Migration Review, Ethnic and Racial Studies Review, and Radical Philosophy Review.
Min-Jung Kwak (Department of Geography, York University)
Dr. Kwak's research and teaching interests are located at the intersection of social, urban and economic geography with a regional focus on Canada and the Asian-Pacific countries. Her substantive interests lie within four areas: The socio-economic integration of immigrants; globalization and urban transnationalism; geographies of ethnic economies; and geographical perspectives of Asian-Pacific development.
Her doctoral thesis, for example, investigates Korean immigrant entrepreneurial activities in the international education industry in Vancouver, Canada and Seoul, Korea. Entitled “Globalizing Canadian Education from Below,” a main objective of the study is to explore the interplay of structural factors and the agency of migrants in driving industrial growth between places of origin and settlement.
Jeeseon Park (Educational and Counselling Psychology, McGill University)
Dr. Park's research areas include: Multicultural and feminist approaches to psychotherapy and mentoring; immigration issues; issues of international students; multicultural training.
Young-Ah Kim (Research Coordinator)
Young-Ah Kim is the Research Coordinator for TKFS project. She works with the research team and the
community partners. Ms. Kim assists with all aspects of the
research study, including conducting a full bibliographic review of Korean and
English language academic literature, coordinating and facilitating the data
collection process, and providing oral and written translations.
Ms. Kim is also a Korean Language and Culture instructor for Toronto District School Board. She has a B.A in Korean Language & Literature from Incheon University, and diplomas in Early Childhood Education and the English language.