Man-pui Sally Chan, Ph.D.

Sally Chan’s research focuses on understanding the underlying mechanisms behind health-related behaviors. She is also interested in combining psychology theory with the data science approach to study health communication strategies and campaigns.

Man-pui Sally Chan is a Research Associate of the Annenberg School for Communication. Chan has a background in information systems and received her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Hong Kong in 2014. She was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship in the Cambridge Prosociality and Well-Being Lab in the UK. Sally has joined the Social Action Lab in the Psychology Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign since late 2015. Her research concerns the underlying psychological mechanisms behind health-related behaviors and decisions in health care contexts. She approaches these problems with a unique combination of psychology theory and data science by incorporating the analysis of surveillance data, secondary datasets, surveys, and social media data (big data) to model patterns of infections and changes of behaviors. Her current research has sought to (a) develop social-media based prediction models of epidemiology and health product use, (b) identify the impact of social media on health behaviors, and (c) create novel, scalable methods of recommendation and intervention for health promotion. Her work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health.