Dr. Josephine Pui-Hing Wong

Dr. Josephine Pui-Hing Wong has extensive experience in critical public health. Prior to joining Ryerson, she was a Planning and Policy Consultant at Toronto Public Health, where she undertook leadership roles in the development of the Access and Equity Policy, the Toronto Public Health Practice Framework, and large-scale health communication campaigns.  She collaborates with marginalized communities to develop, implement and evaluate health promotion and capacity building programs. Josephine see students as active learners with lived experiences that inform their personal- professional perspectives and practices. Her teaching focuses on community health nursing and people-centered urban health promotion, with an emphasis on addressing structural violence and social determinants of health. In addition to her assigned teaching, she collaborates with community partners to establish community-campus critical learning circles that bring together community stakeholders and students to engage in collaborative learning and writing. Josephine’s program of research is underpinned by the principles of social justice and equity. She is committed to doing research “with” and “not for” the affected communities.  She seeks to answer the “so what” question in all her research. Being mindful of the need and urgency to go beyond understanding specific phenomena about health inequities, she works closely with the affected communities to develop socially innovative solutions that promote collective resilience and social change. Her areas of research include: social identities and health practices, migration, HIV, sexual health, and mental health in diasporic and transnational communities. She has led and is leading numerous intervention studies on stigma reduction in the Asian, Black and Latino diasporic communities in Canada as well as among university students in China. Her research is supported by the Ontario HIV Treatment Network (OHTN), the Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR), the Movember Foundation, and Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC).