New faculty spotlight: Soonjo Hwang, M.D.

Soonjo Hwang is a new faculty member at UNMC.

• Name: Soonjo Hwang, M.D.
• Hometown: Seoul, South Korea
• New title and department at UNMC: Assistant professor, UNMC Department of Psychiatry

Research/professional interests:

• neuroscience;
• neuro-image;
• clinical trials in child and adolescent psychiatry; and
• children and adolescents with emotional dysregulation and aggressive/violent behavior.

I was at the National Institute for Mental Health for three and a half years before joining UNMC, and my work was recently accepted to Psychological Medicine. It is a neuro-image study of children and adolescents with disruptive behavior. We were able to show what specific areas of brain are dysfunctional for those children and adolescents, and how it is related to their symptoms, using functional MRI.

How I fell in love with neuroscientific research in child and adolescent psychiatry:
It is indeed an exciting time to conduct neuroscientific research in child and adolescent psychiatry. Utilizing neuroscientific knowledge we have accumulated so far, I plan to do clinical trials targeting specific brain areas related to psychiatric symptom manifestation, such as emotional dysregulation, irritability, and disruptive behavior in children and adolescents. It is pioneering, and very novel. That’s what I like about my work. I hope this would provide better care for those children and adolescents being challenged with mental health issues, eventually.

Degrees:

• M.D., Yonsai University Medical School, 1999

Memberships:

• American Psychiatric Association
• American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry

Three things people may not know about me:

• I am an avid fan of classical music.
• I love movies from 1940s and 1950s.
• I swim.