Lucinda Leung is an Assistant Professor of Medicine and Psychiatry at UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine. She is a general internal medicine physician at VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System, who teaches medical students and residents, as well as cares for hospitalized and clinic patients. Dr. Leung was a first-generation college student who earned her A.B. at Dartmouth College, M.D. at Brown Medical School, M.P.H. at Harvard School of Public Health, and Ph.D. at UCLA School of Public Health. She completed fellowship through the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation VA Clinical Scholars Program and was selected Chief Fellow for UCLA’s Specialty Training and Advanced Research Program. Dr. Leung is a board-certified Clinical Informatics subspecialist.
Dr. Leung’s expertise is in health services research to optimize care for primary care patients with mental health needs. Her work focuses on interdisciplinary team-based care models augmented by virtual care modalities. Poor mental health care access for her patients undermines her ability to successfully treat their medical conditions. Partnering with healthcare system leaders in the Veterans Health Administration and large health care organizations, Dr. Leung studies how to integrate mental health services into primary care practice (e.g., patient-centered medical home, collaborative care for depression, telemedicine), as well as its impact on care utilization, quality, and costs across populations, especially among safety-net patients. She and her research team employ wide-ranging methodologies (e.g., mixed methods research, implementation science cohort analyses, causal inference, pragmatic clinical trials) to understand how to redesign health services to help ensure the best outcomes at the highest value. She has been awarded more than 5 million dollars in federal funding (e.g., VA, National Institutes of Health), has published in leading peer-reviewed journals (e.g., Annals of Internal Medicine, JAMA series), and has provided expert consultation to federal and state agencies (e.g., Government Accountability Office). Dr. Leung was recognized with the Society of General Internal Medicine’s Excellence in Clinician Investigation, a top honor for early-career general internists in California/Hawaii. In 2023, she was named by the National Academy of Medicine as 1 of 10 Emerging Leaders in Health & Medicine Scholars nationally.
Dr. Leung is supported by a VA Health Services Research & Development (HSR&D) Career Development Award to adapt and test primary care-based depression collaborative care models to increase uptake of effective digital mental health treatments for veterans. She recently obtained VA Merit funding to study potential disruption to depression care services during the COVID-19 pandemic, including downstream effects on psychiatric morbidity and mortality from suicide. Dr. Leung is also leading an NIH R01 that examines the effect of pandemic-related state policy changes surrounding telemedicine on patient-reported mental health care access, cost, symptoms, and functioning, with focus on Medicaid populations.