Megan Kirk Chang

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. Her research interests focus on scalable cognitive-behavioral health interventions that integrate mobile/digital health applications and wearable technology to identify biomarkers of severe mental illness and profile treatment effects via autonomic nervous system regulation. 

In her first three-months at Yale, Megan launched a three-arm randomized controlled trial evaluating the effectiveness of two online health interventions to improve mental and social well-being for a diverse sample of college students (61% BIPOC). She received a 2022 Yale Women’s Faculty Forum seed grant to conduct an in-depth investigation of the lived experience of minoritized students from multiple intersectional identities attending an Ivy-League institution. This project was presented to the Yale President’s Office to help inform future mental health staffing, student retention efforts, and tailored programs for underrepresented students.

Megan's PhD dissertation was the first NIH-registered clinical trial in Canada to evaluate an 8-week online CBT, mindfulness meditation, and yoga/exercise intervention for young adults with PTSD. The novelty of this study was the combination of psychometric and objective psychophysiology measures (e.g., heart-rate-variability, pupillometry) to profile the changes in autonomic function pre-post intervention. Large effect-size reductions in PTSD (d = 1.60) symptom severity and pupillometry (d = 0.90) were found, but no change in heart-rate-variability. It was concluded that future clinical mental health interventions should explore longer treatment durations to establish treatment trajectories and a dose-response relationship. This research was recognized with a nomination for an outstanding dissertation award.

Megan's scholarly research track-record is evidenced by 16 journal publications and 15 conference presentations. Notably, a recent first-authored wearable technology meta-analysis in the American Journal of Health Promotion and a top cited first-authored systematic review in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

You can follow Megan on the Insight Timer App and access her free guided meditations and 15-day self-guided course, "The Wisdom of Our Wounds: Healing from Trauma" that currently has over 16 500 students across the world!