Appointment

Associate Investigator/Attending Physician, Institute of Population Health Sciences, National Health Research Institutes, Taiwan

Attending Physician, National Taiwan University Hospital

Personal Information

I am a psychiatrist and a mobile application (app)-developer. I designed my first app in 2011, a time when smartphone ownership was starting to grow around the world. Since then, I have utilized data that were automatically collected by the app to study human-smartphone interactions. My research team has developed three apps, namely “Know Addiction”, “Rhythm” and “Staff Hours”, which automatically record users’ time spent on smartphones, long-term sleep patterns, and work hours, respectively.

Throughout my professional career, I have published 68 articles in international scientific journals (H index=27), including Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, Journal of Medical Internet Research, and Journal of Behavioral Addictions. In addition to drafting original research articles, I often write commentaries on high-profile research topics for journals like JAMA, JAMA Psychiatry and JAMA Pediatrics. I also edited the chapter titled “Smartphone addiction” in the latest edition of the internet addiction textbook edited by Christian Montag.

I currently hold multiple research, clinical, and teaching positions at the National Health Research Institutes and the National Taiwan University Hospital. I am also a member of the Early Career Editorial Board of the Asian Journal of Psychiatry. My research primarily analyzes data from smartphones and open-accessed sources to address prompt responses to important social issues. For instance, my most recent project used Google searches for handwashing to predict COVID-19 transmission rates. This study was published in the journal Brain, Behavior, and Immunity. It was subsequently reported on the international media outlet, Reuters, and was granted the Covid-19 Early Publication Award by the National Taiwan University Hospital.

After becoming a certified psychiatrist, I worked as a product physician (medical advisor) at Pfizer. Therefore, I am familiar with international teamwork and management of clinical trials, biomedical regulations, and scientific promotional activities, especially their implementation in the Asia-Pacific region. In recent years, I have also been an active contributor on both conventional media and social media. Almost all of my scientific articles were transformed into visual abstracts or infographics to create social impacts. As one of the pioneer podcasters within the scientific community in Taiwan, I have launched two scientific podcasts and managed them for more than a year. One of them was the National Health Research Institutes podcast, which became the first podcast program in Taiwan to be established at an academic institution. My podcast program, which introduced timely psychiatric research from top-tier scientific journals, has been one of the most popular podcast programs, averaging over two thousand downloads per episode. The affiliated Facebook page has also amassed more than 17 thousand followers.

Throughout my academic career, I have also received several academic awards, such as the “Young Scientist Award” from the National Health Research Institutes, the “Excellent Paper Award” from the Taiwan Society of Sleep Medicine, the Foundation of Taiwan Medical Development Awards, the best poster award in the World Congress of Biological Psychiatry in Kyoto, as well as the Paul Janssen Research Award in 2013, 2015, 2018.

Research & Clinical Interests