Dr. Cherry Leung is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Community Health Systems. She received her M.S. and preparation as a Pediatric Nurse Practitioner from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in Epidemiology at the School of Public Health at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interest is disease prevention and mental health promotion of children and adolescents, with a primary focus on depression. Cherry’s dissertation research involved the use of Hong Kong’s “Children of 1997” Birth Cohort, a population-representative Chinese birth cohort to facilitate the understanding of modifiable risk factors associated with child and adolescent mental health outcomes. As part of her research, she traced developmental trajectories of childhood behavioral problems and observed their associations with depressive symptoms. In her current, NIH-funded K award, she is characterizing the adolescent gut microbiota and examining the association of gut microbiota with depressive symptoms through mediation of the immune pathway. Dr. Leung is a Co-Investigator on our lab’s study: ‘Fetal Programming of the Microbiome and its Mediating Role in Infant Stress Dysregulation.’ During her previous postdoctoral fellowship, she also worked in the lab on our ‘‘Antenatal Corticosteroids, Maternal Depression and Preterm Infant Stress Response’ study.