Victoria K. Ngo, Ph.D., clinical psychologist, is a postdoctoral fellow in the Jane and Terry Semel Institute of Neuroscience and Human Behavior's Health Services Research Center in the Department of Psychiatry at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. She received her PhD in August 2006 from Vanderbilt University and currently works under the mentorship of Dr. Jeanne Miranda. Dr. Ngo is interested in the role of culture and context (i.e., SES, neighborhood, and family factors) on the conceptualization, assessment, and treatment outcomes for ethnic minorities, particularly Asian immigrants and refugees. She has experience with measurement adaptation and validation procedures for child psychopathology measures such as the Child Behavior Checklist.

Dr. Ngo's research has included the examination of cultural equivalence in psychopathology measures across various ethnic groups using both qualitative (focus groups) and quantitative (Item Response Theory and Factor Analysis) methods. Currently, she also conducts research in Vietnam and is involved in developing the first doctoral clinical psychology program in Hanoi, funded by the NIH Fogarty Center. In addition, she has conducted focus group studies on Vietnamese conceptualizations of mental health problems across 18 groups of parents, teachers, and professionals in Vietnam. She will conduct similar focus groups in the U.S. to explore how context shapes people's definitions of problematic behaviors. She also plans to use her research on the role of culture in defining psychopathology to guide intervention adaptation for Asian families in the U.S. and abroad. She is now in the process of developing a collaborative project with middle schools in Vietnam to adapt Cognitive Behavioral Intervention for Trauma in Schools (CBITS) for use with the Vietnamese community.

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