Wen-Ying Sylvia Chou, Ph.D., M.P.H., is a Program Director in the Health Communication and Informatics Research Branch of the Behavioral Research Program at the National Cancer Institute, NIH. Her research interests include social media and health, health literacy, and patient-provider communication. Trained as a sociolinguist, she has expertise in mixed methods analyses of health care interactions. She has led a number of NIH initiatives on the role of technology and social media in health, including funding initiatives on the impact of the changing communication landscape on substance use and on cancer prevention and control. Currently, Dr. Chou is leading a program of research addressing health-related misinformation online and serving as a guest editor for a special theme issue in the American Journal of Public Health on misinformation on social media. Dr. Chou has more than 80 peer-reviewed publications on topics ranging from palliative care and prognosis communication in cancer, health-related Internet use, to studies that document the benefits and risks of social media use on health.

Dr. Chou began her NIH career as a postdoctoral fellow in NCI’s Cancer Prevention Fellowship Program. She obtained her M.S. and Ph.D. in Linguistics from Georgetown University. Her doctoral dissertation examined end-of-life discourse through an ethnographic and linguistic analysis of interactions between seriously-ill cancer patients and caregivers. She holds a bachelor's degree in Music from Santa Clara University in California and a master's degree in Public Health from the Interdisciplinary M.P.H. program at University of California, Berkeley.