Jungwon Min, PhD, MS, is a Research Professor and Director of the BECCA Lab at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. Her research focuses on child health and development, with a particular emphasis on preventing disease and injury. She applies a life course perspective and systems science methods to examine biological susceptibility, familial and societal factors, gene-environment interactions, and the impact of clinical and community interventions on child health outcomes.
Dr. Min has contributed to numerous intervention studies targeting childhood obesity, including the Mission-X program in collaboration with NASA and a National Institutes of Health-funded U54 grant that involved both domestic and international collaborations. Her work also addresses youth mental, sexual, and sleep health, as well as maternal depression—reflecting a broad commitment to improving child and adolescent well-being.
Building on this foundation, her recent research has focused on how social and structural determinants shape health disparities among youth. She has shown that children from racial and ethnic minority groups and those living in socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods were disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic across multiple domains, including mental health, obesity, and access to sexually transmitted infection screening. She has also demonstrated that these youth are more likely to experience violence—such as fighting and retaliation—and to perceive firearms as readily accessible in their neighborhoods. These findings underscore the importance of universal behavioral health and violence risk screening in primary care and highlight the integration of neighborhood-level data into health services research and policy as critical social determinants of health.