Rate My Professor Shufang Sun

Shufang Sun is an Associate Professor of Behavioral and Social Sciences in the Brown University School of Public Health, a Public Health faculty member focused on behavioral sciences, and Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at the Alpert Medical School. She serves as Associate Director of the Mindfulness Center at Brown University and Director and Principal Investigator of the Mindfulness for Health Equity Lab (mHEAL). Sun earned her PhD in Counseling Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2018, Master of Arts in Community Counseling from East Tennessee State University in 2012, and Bachelor of Science in Psychology with a minor in Sociology through a joint program between East Tennessee State University and Shandong Teachers’ University in 2010. After her doctorate, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Biobehavioral HIV Research funded by the National Institute of Mental Health at Brown University from 2018 to 2020 and a clinical psychology internship at Emory University School of Medicine from 2017 to 2018. She joined the Brown University School of Public Health as Assistant Professor in 2020 and advanced to Associate Professor.

Sun's research specializes in developing and evaluating mindfulness-based interventions to promote mental and behavioral health among youth and vulnerable populations affected by stress, trauma, systemic inequities, stigma, and health disparities. Her work employs mobile health technologies, community-engaged approaches, and mixed methods to address minority stress, particularly among sexual and gender minorities, and spans the United States and low- and middle-income countries including China, Germany, the Philippines, and Ukraine. Notable projects include the Mindfulness-based Queer Resilience program, interventions for psychologically distressed university students during COVID-19 quarantine, and programs for gestational diabetes management and youth suicide prevention. She has published extensively in high-impact journals, including 'Mindfulness-based interventions among people of color: A systematic review and meta-analysis' in Psychotherapy Research (2022), 'A mindfulness-based mobile health (mHealth) intervention among psychologically distressed university students in quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic' in Journal of Counseling Psychology (2021), 'Mobile phone interventions to improve health outcomes among patients with chronic diseases' in The Lancet Digital Health (2024), and 'A social-ecological perspective on social contagion of self-harm among young people' in Nature Reviews Psychology (2025). Sun has received major awards such as the International Collaborative Prevention Research Award from the Society for Prevention Research (2025), Early Career Research Achievement Award from Brown University (2025), Early Career Award for Excellence in Counseling Health Psychology from the American Psychological Association Division 17 (2024), Barbara Smith & Jewell E. Horvat Early Career Award from APA Division 45 (2024), and Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research Collaboration from Brown School of Public Health (2023). She holds the position of Associate Editor at JMIR-Mental Health.