Diversity Center Guest Speaker Series - Dr. Lawrence Yang: Culture and How it Shapes and Protects against Mental Illness Stigma: Empirical Illustrations from Chinese Groups

Palo Alto University’s Center for Excellence in Diversity, co-directed by Drs. Joyce Chu and Stanley Sue, is part of Palo Alto University's initiative to promote and support scholarship and application of diversity in research and clinical practice.  
Palo Alto University (PAU) would like to invite the public to come join for lunch and the guest speaker series – Dr. Lawrence Yang, will be giving a talk from 2-3 PM on Monday, April 27th. Lunch will be served at 1:45 PM, and CE credits are available! 

Dr. Lawrence Yang is an Associate Professor of Epidemiology at Columbia Robert M. Sellers University. Dr. Yang received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Boston University and completed his clinical training at Harvard Medical School/ Massachusetts Mental Health Center. Dr. Yang’s research focuses on several key areas of psychiatric epidemiology. First, from his NIMH K-award, he has formulated defining theoretical work on how culture relates to stigma and implementing interventions to improve social and symptomatic recovery for different stigmatizing conditions (mental illness and HIV), with a focus on psychosis in Chinese groups. Second, Dr. Yang is PI of a 5-year NIMH R01 grant examining the neurocognitive and social cognitive underpinnings of the new "clinical high risk state for psychosis" designation, a potentially transformative new syndrome to detect psychotic signs before symptoms develop into a full psychotic disorder. Third, Dr. Yang has incorporated these research areas into his work in global mental health, with a particular emphasis on the clinical and cognitive characteristics of untreated psychosis in China. He also leads a component of a NIMH U19 grant investigating the barriers and facilitators involved in scale up of mental health interventions for psychosis in Latin America (Chile, Brazil and Argentina). He has sixty-one publications (fifty-one peer-reviewed papers plus 10 book chapters; >50% first-authored), including publications in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Psychological Medicine, the British Journal of Psychiatry and The Lancet. Dr. Yang has received eight Early Career Awards, six of which are national, for his work.