Lindsay Young is an assistant professor of health communication and communicationnetworks at USC Annenberg. Her research employs social-network and critical perspectives to identify, characterize, and interrogate the social contexts that contribute to and/or facilitate health disparities, access to critical health resources, and health behavior change in marginalized, resource-restricted communities. She has a particular interest in the contextual factors that affect HIV-prevention engagement among young sexual-minority men of color. To these ends, she applies a rich computational toolkit that includes stochastic network modeling, semantic network mapping, computational text analysis and predictive modeling.

Young’s work is also driven by a praxis orientation, governed by a desire to help affected communities leverage the power of their organic networks toward improved community health. To these ends, she draws on community-oriented, asset-based models of community development and social network theories of health behavior change to design community health interventions that privilege intrinsic structures and assets.

Currently, her work is supported by an NIH Career Development Pathway to Independence Award, funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). Her work has been published in top-tier, peer-reviewed journals across multiple research domains such as Social Science and Medicine, AIDS and Behavior, Clinical Trials, Preventive Medicine Reports, Social Networks, and Network Science.