Dr. Chung is a nationally recognized leader in pediatric health services research and policy. His areas of interest and expertise include children with medical and/or social complexity, pediatric primary and complex care redesign, and policy-relevant issues including poverty, childhood adversity and resilience, child development, educational environments, juvenile justice, health behaviors, and family leave. In addition, he is well versed in a variety of analytic approaches and study designs, including community-engaged research, longitudinal analysis, qualitative analysis, and experimental and quasi-experimental designs. He is past chair of the Pediatric Policy Council and past president of the Academic Pediatric Association. Major current projects include:
• A Randomized, Controlled Trial of a Telephone-Based Developmental Care Coordination System / Achieving My Potential (AMP): To test whether 211LA, part of the 2-1-1 health and human services telephone hotline network covering >90% of the nation, can increase developmental screening and care coordination and improve developmental outcomes for a diverse set of pediatric clinics in LA versus usual care.
• Addressing Obesity in Early Care and Education Settings: To test whether the Child Care Resource Center, a community organization serving child care providers and parents, can 1) implement a multi-level, multi-component intervention integrating healthy eating and physical activity into preschool routines and 2) improve child BMI at a diverse set of preschools in LA versus usual healthy eating and physical activity curricula.
• MCH Research Network Programs / Children and Youth with Special Health Care Needs Network / CYSHCNet: To serve on the network’s executive committee as a Kaiser Foundation Research Institute site PI for this national network to help provide governance. In addition, to oversee the implementation of the ACTIV parent confidence assessment through text messaging study at UCLA, including design, development, implementation, analysis, and dissemination.
• Measuring Team Effectiveness for Students Training in Health Systems Science: 1. Develop a common multi-institutional assessment approach for collaborative learning activities to monitor a medical student’s achievement of Milestones and Educational Program Outcomes related to Interprofessional Collaboration, Teamwork, and Professionalism. 2. Inform the development of HSS curricular and related clinical experiences that incorporate factors enabling team effectiveness.  3. Identify elements of collaborative learning activities for HSS curricula and experiences that have potential to scale to the wider national undergraduate medical education (UME) community.
• RE-PACT: Refine and adapt the Respiratory Exacerbation Plans for Action and Care Transitions (RE-PACT) intervention program to severe respiratory illness for children with severe CP across two clinical programs with racial/ethnic and socioeconomic patient diversity; and establish RE- PACT’s feasibility, acceptability and effect sizes in preparation for a future fully powered multisite randomized controlled trial of RE-PACT.