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Associate Professor
Department of Health Education & Behavior
FLG 19
P.O. Box 18210
Gainesville, FL 32611-8210
(352) 294-1811 | jwcheong@ufl.edu
JeeWon Cheong joined the Department of Health Education and Behavior in 2015. As a quantitative social psychologist, she has two lines of research: (1) methodological research in mediation analysis and (2) research in substance use and related risk behaviors among adolescents and adults. Mediation analysis is a family of statistical methods that assesses the effects of a mediator (a third variable intervening in the relation between the independent and the outcome variables) and investigates the causal mechanisms. As an expert on mediation analysis and longitudinal modeling, she has published multiple peer-reviewed journal articles and handbook chapters on methods for testing mediation, with a focus on longitudinal mediation, wherein changes in the mediator and the outcome are modeled based on repeated observations measured over time. Closely related to her work in mediation analysis, her substantive research focuses on risk and protective factors of substance use and related risk behaviors, as they can be targeted to modify in prevention/intervention settings and explain underlying mechanisms of how intervention/prevention programs work. For this line of research, she has worked with large-scale longitudinal prevention studies for children and adolescents and investigated the role of social environmental factors, particularly parents and peers, in shaping the developmental course of adolescent substance use.
Before joining the University of Florida, Dr. Cheong held academic positions at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), the University of Pittsburgh, and the State University of New York (SUNY) – Albany. Throughout her academic career, she has been actively involved in multiple NIH and CDC grants as a lead methodologist. With expertise in content areas of substance use, HIV related risk behaviors, and community- and school-based intervention/prevention, she has led analysis teams and coordinated the collaborative work of multiple substantive researchers and biostatisticians/methodologists, as well as conducting her own research and mentoring undergraduate and graduate students. Her leadership role at previous institutions includes the primary methodologist for the Core Research Project of the CDC-funded Prevention Research Center and the UAB Center for the Study of Community Health, and the liaison between two research cores in the UAB Center for AIDS Research, the Behavioral and Community Science Core and the Biostatistics and Analysis Core.
Currently, Dr. Cheong is involved in several longitudinal studies funded by NIAAA, NIDA, and CDC, including investigation of mechanisms of natural recovery from problem drinking among community-dwelling adults, substance use among sexual minority youths, and HIV/AIDS risks among young adults in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods.