We are delighted to announce that Mr. Siyu Chen, PhD candidate in Public Health at the JC School of Public Health and Primary Care, CUHK, has won the Reaching Out Award provided by the HKSAR Government Scholarship Fund for his four-month visit in Yale University, the United States.
Grated on a competitive basis, the Reaching Out Award aims to support students who need to travel out of Hong Kong to participate for overseas studies, internships, field trips, conferences, competitions, and so on.
During his visit in Yale University from December 2024 to March 2025, Mr. Chen worked as a Visiting Assistant in Research within a multidisciplinary team for a project focused on developing, evaluating, and implementing a multimodal AI chatbot to increase HIV testing among men who have sex with men in Malaysia.
Mr. Chen assisted the team in designing the chatbot prototype by integrating technical, behavioral, and public health perspectives. He also participated in developing the framework for a proposed randomized controlled trial. Mr. Chen’s work contributed to the team’s proposal for seeking a grant from the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
Mr. Chen found the experience rewarding in strengthening the critical skill of grant writing, and enriching his knowledge in digital health and implementation science. “It gave me experience of the advanced technology in designing an AI chatbot for HIV prevention and broadened my perspective through international collaboration,” Mr. Chen said. “It provided valuable insight into applying digital tools in real-world public health settings and supported my development in research planning and teamwork.”
Mr. Chen has been supervised by Professor Johnson Zixin Wang for his PhD studies entitled “Development and Evaluation of a Chatbot Providing Real-time Counseling Supporting HIV Self-testing (HIVST-Chatbot) for Men Who Have Sex with Men”.
Our warmest congratulations to Mr. Chen for his achievement and best wishes for his bright future.