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Megan Kirk Chang, PhD

Megan Kirk Chang, PhD

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Megan Kirk Chang

BA, MA, PG Dip, PhD


Senior Researcher, Behavioural Medicine

  • Oxford Health BRC Preventing Multiple Morbidities Theme
  • Health Behaviours Team, Nuffield Department of Primary Care
  • CHiMES Team, Department of Psychiatry

Bridging Primary Care and Psychiatry

Megan Kirk Chang is a Senior Researcher at the University of Oxford in the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences. Megan holds a PhD in Kinesiology and Health Sciences and an Advanced Doctoral Diploma in Health Psychology from York University, Toronto, Canada. She held a Postdoctoral Associate position at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence in the Yale School of Medicine. With two decades of experience in academia and healthcare settings (e.g., CAMH, Toronto General Hospital) in Canada, the USA, and now the UK, Megan excels in leading complex multi-site, multidisciplinary NIH-registered health behaviour trials for adults with multiple long-term conditions, particularly exploring the combined effects of diet, exercise, and mindfulness on mental and physical health outcomes. 

As a Senior Researcher on the Oxford Health BRC Preventing Multiple Morbidities theme, Megan leads a subtheme focused on developing behaviour change interventions for adults with mental illness to reduce non-communicable disease risk factors. This includes managing a large project portfolio, developing effective multidisciplinary collaborations, and overseeing BRC multi-site operations. Megan has successfully designed and executed complex clinical trials integrating explanatory psychobiological mechanistic measures of gut-microbiome, morning cortisol, and heart-rate-variability (HRV) self-monitoring into existing protocols including the following:

Current Projects:

  • DIME Trial: Ketogenic Diet for Treatment Resistant Depression
  • PREV-D Trial: Ketogenic Diet with or without Physical Activity for the Prevention of Dementia
  • MINDSET Trial: Insomnia treatment for adults with PTSD and Nicotine Dependence
  • NIHR Team Science: Development of a Precision Medicine Tool to Measure Quality of Life in Adults with Multiple Long-Term Conditions
  • Diet & Cognition Meta-Regression

Beyond academia, Megan leads the “CuppaCoach” sessions to offer mentorship and professional development for EMCRs in grant application revisions, interview preparation, and navigating challenging career decisions.

As a certified mindfulness instructor with a large global following on the Insight Timer app, you can follow Megan and access her free guided meditations and 15-day self-guided course, "The Wisdom of Our Wounds: Healing from Trauma" that currently has over 22 000 students across the world!

For DPhil inquiries, please contact Megan with your CV and proposed project.

Research Interests:

  • Metabolic psychiatry clinical trials for adults with trauma, PTSD, depression, anxiety, and psychosis
  • Individual-Level behavioural interventions (stand-alone and multi-component) 
  • Physical activity, exercise, movement, yoga, mindfulness, breath, diet, sleep intervention design
  • Digital health and wearable technology 
  • Autonomic nervous system function, emotion dysregulation
  • Measurement of emotion regulation
  • Behavioural Medicine and behaviour change theory
  • Mixed-methods research design
  • Advanced multi-level modelling for clinical trials
  • Systematic reviews and meta-analysis, meta-regression, network meta-analysis