Career Speaker: Lilian Shin-Cho

Lilian Shin-Cho, PhD, grew up in Houston, Texas, with both of her Korean immigrant parents, physicians. She grew up thinking she would become a physician too and excelled at academics in high school. Lilian attended Northwestern University for her undergraduate studies where she initially majored in pre-med. However, she quickly realized that molecules and formulas were not for her. After taking her first psychology class, she realized how little knowledge she had about mental health issues growing up in a Korean American family where it was a stigmatized topic. Fueled by a desire to know more, she read psychology books “for fun.” After college, she explored other career paths, including teaching, but ended up gravitating toward psychology again while teaching a high school psychology class! Although she enjoyed teaching psychology, she soon realized that having to “extrovert” on a daily basis was not for her. She decided to try research and volunteered to work at a research lab in Atlanta, GA focused on suicidal, abused African American women. This led her to apply for a PhD program in Social Psychology at the University of California, Riverside. There, she studied positive psychology and the science of well-being, specifically within cross-cultural contexts. Although she faced many challenges during her 5-year program, she used these challenges as an opportunity to grow as a person, scientist, and to gain the skills she needed to succeed as a researcher upon graduation. She then completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Cancer Prevention and Control at MD Anderson Cancer Center. (Ironically, she ended up working at the same hospital her parents were employed by 35 years prior even though she had chosen a different path than medicine!) At MD Anderson, Lilian expanded her research interests to include the psychosocial well-being of Asian Americans living with cancer. Following her postdoctoral fellowship, she was hired on as faculty at Fox Chase Cancer Center in 2024, where she is applying her passion for Asian Americans, psychology, and cancer to conduct research in these areas. She works with Asian American community organizations to develop psychosocial interventions aimed to increase the well-being of Asian American cancer patients and their caregivers.