Associate Professor of Preventive Medicine, Yonsei University College of Medicine

Epidemiologist specialising in mental-physical health and suicide prevention

Sun Jae Jung is an Associate Professor in the Department of Preventive Medicine at Yonsei University College of Medicine, where she teaches epidemiological methods and causal inference. Her research focuses on the bidirectional relationships between mental and physical health, with particular emphasis on cardiovascular, endocrine, and reproductive conditions in relation to major mental disorders, including post-traumatic stress disorder and major depressive disorder.

A central pillar of her work is suicide prevention. She is the Principal Investigator of the first large-scale, population-based cohort study on suicide and self-harm among children and adolescents in Korea, integrating biological, clinical, and social determinants of risk. She has served as Principal Investigator or Co–Principal Investigator on multiple nationally funded studies and has secured over USD 20 million in competitive research funding from the Korean Ministry of Health and Welfare and other national agencies. Her work has been recognised with several awards, including the Young Investigator Award (2019), the Young Epidemiologist Award (2021), and the Hanmi Young Medical Scientist Award (2024).

Dr. Jung received her MD from Yonsei University College of Medicine, completed specialist training in Preventive Medicine at Seoul National University College of Medicine, and earned her PhD in Epidemiology from Seoul National University. She was a Yerby Fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Contribution to BrainWaves
Sun Jae Jung contributes expertise in epidemiology, suicide prevention, and population-based mental health research, supporting BrainWaves’ mission to advance understanding of brain health and mental health risk across the life course.