Dr. Wendy Lam joined School of Public Health in September, 2007. She completed her Ph.D. specialized in Psycho-oncology in 2002. She’s the foundation recipient of The Hong Kong Cancer Fund Scholarship in Psycho-oncology for 2001-2002. She is also the recipient of Hiroomi Kawano New Investigator Award, International Psycho-oncology Society (IPOS), for 2007. The award, in memory of Dr. Hiroomi Kawano, the founder of the Japanese Psycho-Oncology Society and the Japanese Society for Death and Dying, is presented to a new investigator for outstanding research contributions in psycho-oncology within five-years of completing a PhD.

Her research interests areas are two-fold: psycho-oncology and research methodology. She promotes mixed-methods approaches to increase the overall validity of studies. She has broad experience in quantitative and various qualitative research methods. She has been exploring novel applications of various quantitative methods derived from Structural Equation Modeling for analyzing longitudinal data. She has become very experienced in applying Linear Mixed Modeling, Latent Growth Modeling and Growth Mixture Modeling to address new questions and refine existing hypotheses enabling our group to overturn some previously established theoretical positions and build more robust evidence and theory. Her second research interest is in psycho-oncology, particularly focusing on psychosocial adaptation patterns and service optimization in women with breast cancer. Currently, she is exploring how personal factors (such as personality and information processing) and consultation factors influence psychosocial adaption to cancer (and hence related health care demand). She has made significant novel contributions to the literature resulting from applying my methodological interests to questions in psycho-oncology.

She has produced 130 outputs, comprising 62 publications, including one book chapter and 56 international peer-reviewed co-authored articles, most in high impact international journals, including Cancer, Psycho-oncology, Breast Cancer Research and Treatment, and Journal of Clinical Oncology. She has received 24 research grants, 14 as principal investigator. She has also implemented an international collaboration with psycho-oncology teams in Australia, Germany, Japan, Mainland China and Taiwan to extend the study of supportive care needs of Chinese cancer patients. She was a Foundation Member of the East Asian Psycho-Oncology Network in 2008. She is an appointed member of the Grant Review Boards for the Research Fund for Health and Medical Research Fund, the Hong Kong SAR Government. She reviews manuscripts for various international peer-review journals including Psycho-oncology, Cancer, Breast Cancer Research and Treatment, and Social Science Medicine and she is an Academic Editor by invitation for PLoS One.