Speaker

Dr Jean Encinas-Franco

Associate Professor, College of Social Sciences and Philosophy

University of the Philippines, Diliman

Jean Encinas-Franco is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, College of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of the Philippines, Diliman. Before she entered the academiae, she worked at the Senate of the Philippines, where she was Director of the Senate Economic Planning Office. She also lectured at the International Studies Department of Miriam College and was a Faculty Associate of its Women and Gender Institute. Her dissertation explores the politics of labor out-migration in the Philippines and the discursive representation of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) as “modern-day heroes”.

Moderator

Dr Brian Hall

Associate Professor and Director of Global and Community Mental Health Research Group

University of Macau

Brian J. Hall, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Macau, and Associate Faculty within the Department of Health Behavior and Society, at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr. Hall earned his PhD in Clinical Psychology at Kent State University in the Department of Psychological Sciences and trained as an epidemiologist on a two-year NIMH T32 postdoctoral fellowship in Psychiatric Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr. Hall then completed a Fogarty Global Health Fellowship, with a placement in China to investigate social networks, HIV, and mental health among migrant communities. Dr. Hall’s research interests center on improving population health and wellbeing through community engagement and scalable digital interventions. Dr. Hall’s qualitative and epidemiological studies of migrant Filipino and Indonesian domestic workers were among the first to comprehensively address the burdens of mental, physical, and sexual health within this population. Dr. Hall serves or has served as a consultant for the World Health Organization, UNAIDS, UNICEF, and local government offices and NGOs in China. He is also Associate Editor for the journals Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being, Anxiety, Stress, and Coping, and Frontiers in Psychology: Health Psychology, and serves on 5 other journal editorial boards, including Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology. He is the founding co-chair of the Migrant Health Working Group of the Global Health Program of the Association of Pacific Rim Universities.