Description of Research Expertise

Currently a postdoctoral researcher in Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, Ling Na holds a PhD in Communication from the University of Maryland (advisor Dr. Dale Hample) and degrees in Engineering, Creative Writing and Linguistics. At Penn, her work focuses on health outcomes and care experiences of people with disabilities. In collaboration with university faculty members and community organizations in the US and Canada, Ling has worked on projects that focused on illness experiences of disadvantaged groups. She has studied support messages given to African Americans living with HIV/AIDS, environmental barriers and coping strategies of persons living with HBV in China, immigrant health literacy skills and experiences of care in Canada, to name a few. Her dissertation studied social networks of Canadians and how social integration such as social ties with ethic others influenced health via psychological mediators. She has also done research on health services using administrative databases. As a senior analyst at the Canadian Institute for Health Information, Ling collaborated with colleagues to establish the methodology to benchmark nursing home performance, and investigated weekend in-hospital mortality and population health indicators in Canada. Her work has appeared in Journal of Health Communication, Health Communication, and Western Journal of Communication.

Outside academia, Ling worked as a reporter in New York City, where she gained a deep understanding of the social and health systems, especially immigrant health issues. While working as a medical writer with scientists and physicians at Canada’s largest research-intensive children’s hospital, the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) in Toronto, she wrote medical reports which appeared in the major media such as Vancouver Sun and Ottawa Citizen. She has provided interpreting services for hospitals and government organizations in Canada, conducted demographic and epidemiological research and wrote reports for Maryland county government.