Subin Na

I am a mental health services researcher and computational social scientist studying how mental health systems shape access to care, experiences within services, and sustained engagement and recovery.

I am a PhD Candidate in Social Welfare at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy & Practice. I study how mental health service systems and the workforce that staffs them support recovery and equitable access to care. My work moves across three connected areas, recovery-oriented practice and the peer workforce that delivers it, help-seeking and sustained engagement in mental health services, and the growing role of technology in how care is sought and delivered.

These questions grew out of my training as a mental health social worker in Korea, where I saw how often a diagnosis came to define a person’s whole life and how rarely those living with mental illness were asked what recovery should mean to them. Too often the system had little to offer them, in part because it was built without the people it was meant to serve. My doctoral work carries these concerns in new directions. I treat racial and cultural context as part of what mental health care is, not an add-on to it, and I put lived experience and peer leadership at the center of how care gets designed. I have also turned to computational methods that let me ask different questions of large-scale data.

Methodologically, I use quantitative, computational, and mixed-methods approaches, including machine learning, natural language processing, structural equation modeling, multilevel modeling, and text-as-data methods. I use these tools to generate evidence that informs mental health policy, service delivery, and implementation.

My dissertation examines how the peer specialist role is defined and valued in the labor market. In Rhetoric of Peer Support and Reality of Labor, I analyze peer specialist job postings to study how employers construct the role, the institutional contexts that shape it, and how the work is compensated.

I am on the academic job market starting Fall 2026 and welcome opportunities to connect, so please feel free to reach out to me at subinna@upenn.edu.

Subin Na, MA, LSW

Subin Na

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