Nari Yoo, PhD, is an assistant professor at the School of Social Work and a scholar in the NIH-funded Michigan Program for Advancing Cultural Transformation (M-PACT). She studies well-being and service use among immigrant and refugee, racial and ethnic minority, and linguistic minority populations, and how digital technology is reshaping access, delivery and implementation of care for these groups. Her work spans three levels of the care system: (1) the delivery system, including workforce composition, the availability of culturally and linguistically concordant care, state-level policy environments, and the adoption and implementation of AI in services; (2) the populations, including their mental health and well-being, help-seeking and coping, informal care networks, and use of digital and AI-mediated resources; and (3) the practitioners, including capacity-building and the cultural and linguistic adaptation and development of interventions. Across these three levels, she approaches care delivery as a question of equity and implementation: how interventions reach, adapt to, and are sustained in communities that have been marginalized and underserved, toward mental health access for all in the age of AI. She combines quantitative and computational methods with community-engaged research approaches, with particular interest in natural language processing (NLP) and large language models across research, practice, and education.
Her first-authored papers have been published in journals such as Psychiatric Services, Social Science & Medicine, Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research, Digital Health, and International Migration Review. Her dissertation received the Outstanding Social Work Doctoral Dissertation Award from the Society for Social Work and Research and was supported by the American Psychological Association and the Grand Challenges for Social Work. At New York University, she co-organized the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science (SICSS)–NYU Silver, directed a continuing education certificate program on AI and mental health, and taught graduate and doctoral courses on research methods, statistics and artificial intelligence in social work. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Technology in Human Services and collaborates with community-based organizations on projects related to immigrant and diaspora mental health. She is also a faculty affiliate of the e-Health and Artificial Intelligence (e-HAIL) initiative, the Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation (IHPI), the Michigan Institute for Data and AI in Society (MIDAS), and the Curtis Center for Health Services Research & Innovation. Yoo holds a PhD in social work from New York University and master's and bachelor's degrees in social welfare and sociology from Ewha Womans University.
