Subin Na

Subin Na is a Ph.D. candidate in Social Welfare at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy & Practice. Her research examines how mental health service systems and their workforce shape recovery, access to care, and sustained engagement, with particular attention to the peer workforce, help-seeking and service engagement, and the growing role of technology in how care is sought and delivered. Methodologically, she draws on computational social science approaches, including natural language processing and machine learning, alongside multilevel modeling and mixed methods. Her dissertation analyzes a national corpus of online job postings for peer specialist positions to trace how employers configure the role, and how organizational, policy, and wage contexts shape those configurations. Her work has appeared in journals including Psychiatric Rehabilitation Journal and Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research, and received an Honorable Mention for the CSWE Disability Manuscript Award. Her research grows out of years of hands-on experience alongside people living with serious mental illness, including internships and teaching in Clubhouse and psychiatric hospital settings in Korea. These experiences shaped her commitment to recovery-oriented, rights-based approaches to mental health care, and to research that keeps the people served at its center. She holds a B.A. in Social Welfare and Economics (summa cum laude) and an M.A. in Social Welfare from Seoul National University.