Detailed Biography:

Dr. Leung earned her undergraduate degree in Psychological & Brain Sciences and Chinese Language & Literature at Dartmouth College, her medical degree at Brown Alpert Medical School, her Master of Public Health degree in Family & Community Health at Harvard School of Public Health, and her Doctor of Philosophy in Health Policy & Management at UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. Following Internal Medicine residency at UCLA Ronald Reagan Medical Center, she completed health services research fellowships through the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program, the Veteran Affairs Quality Scholars Program, and UCLA’s Specialty Training and Advanced Research Program, where she was selected as a Chief Fellow.

Dr. Leung's expertise is in health services research to optimize care for primary care patients with mental health needs, through team-based care models and virtual care. She conducts quality improvement and operations-partnered research activities as part of the VA Primary Care Analytics Team, and has comprehensively examined several national initiatives, including Patient Aligned Care Teams (patient-centered medical homes), Primary Care-Mental Health Integration (collaborative care models), and Clinical Resource Hubs (contingency clinician staffing via telehealth). Dr. Leung is experienced leading research that isolates effects of primary care team models on health care access, utilization, quality, and costs in large patient populations. She has employed a wide range of methodologies (e.g., community-partnered research approaches, mixed-methods research, implementation science, longitudinal cohort analyses, and other secondary data analyses) to redesign practices aiming to enhance healthcare quality and reduce cost. Dr. Leung has published in leading medical and health policy journals, including Annals of Internal Medicine, the JAMA series, American Journal of Public Health, Health Affairs, among others.

Dr. Leung is a VA HSR&D Career Development Awardee who is adapting and testing collaborative care models enhanced with computerized cognitive behavioral therapy to treat VA primary care patients with depression. Additionally supported by the VA Offices of Primary Care and of Connected Care, she co-leads a mixed-methods evaluation of telehealth implementation across VA primary care clinics nationally during the COVID-19 pandemic, in an effot to improve delivery of hybrid (in-person/virtual) primary care services.