Michele Wong is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Social Welfare at the Luskin School of Public Affairs and a graduate student researcher with the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. Broadly, her research focuses on the conceptualization and assessment of gendered racial microaggressions among Asian American women in the workplace. Michele aims to advance research on workplace discrimination and harassment by highlighting the unique experiences and impact of gendered racial microaggressions on Asian American women to inform organizational policies and programs such as the Occupational and Employee Assistance Programs (EAP).

Michele’s dissertation examines how gendered racial microaggressions that are unique to Asian American women may serve as a mechanism that reproduces institutional inequities and health disparities among Asian American women in the workplace. Further, this research explores whether the diversity climate within organizations can help to mitigate some of the negative effects of gendered racial microaggressions. This work has been supported by the Southern California NIOSH Education and Research Center (SCERC) Pilot Project Research Training (PPRT) Program Grant. Michele’s research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Ethnicity & Health and the International Journal of Social Psychiatry. She has also presented her research at the Asian American Psychological Association (AAPA) and the Association for Psychological Science (APS).

Michele has several years of teaching experience, assisting in teaching undergraduates in an intensive summer research training program in the Labor Studies Department at UCLA. She supports the students in developing their own research (e.g., survey and interview guide design, data collection, data analysis, developing policy briefs etc.) focused on workers and learners, or students that both work and go to school.

Before entering the doctoral program, Michele worked as the lab manager for the African American Knowledge Optimized for Mindfully Healthy Adolescents (AAKOMA) Project Lab. She obtained her B.A. in Psychology from Ithaca College, and MSPH in Community Health Sciences from the Fielding School of Public Health at UCLA.