Pauline Sung

Associate Professor, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University,
The Department of Applied Social Sciences
HJ402, Department of Applied Social Sciences,
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, 
Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong 

Email:Pauline.Sung@polyu.edu.hk

Pauline is a family therapist who teaches, researches, writes, and consults about family therapy with Chinese families, educating reflective family therapists, and developing professional artistry and wisdom from clinical practice. Currently, she is an Associate Professor in Social Work in the Department of Applied Social Sciences at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and a clinical fellow & supervisor of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy. Her major contribution is to incorporate family therapy as a major component in social work by establishing the first post-graduate family therapy program in Hong Kong in 1992 and introducing family therapy into China in 2000.

In collaboration with Professor Donald Schon of MIT, Pauline developed a groundbreaking theory to explain how experienced practitioners learn new knowledge so as to promote innovative organizational changes. For the past two decades, she has actively promoted partnership between academics and government/non-profit-making organizations to pioneer the use of action research to promote organizational change and generate practice knowledge in Hong Kong and China. She has also transferred her expertise to develop new knowledge for organizational changes in the field of public health. From 2005-2007, Pauline had led a multi-disciplinary research team of medicine, sport science, nutritional science and family therapy in Hong Kong to conduct a number of cross- sectional and qualitative studies on the relationship between family dynamics and childhood obesity. In 2006-2011, her team had launched the first of its kind endeavor in formulating and validating a family-based model to address the adolescent obesity epidemic in Hong Kong. Recently, her research team is conducting the first translational research in Shanghai, China to disseminate and implement the evidences generated from the Hong Kong family-based intervention for preventing adolescent obesity.

In 2011, Pauline was awarded as a Fulbright Scholar at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis. She collaborated with Prof. Ross Brownson and other distinguished faculty members of the Prevention Research Center of WUST to introduce a new discipline, the dissemination and implementation science, to China. Moreover, she co-edited a book specific to dissemination research in China: Building Knowledge in China through Practice-based and Evidence-Based Research. 

Pauline’s academic and research interests include organizational learning and change, collaborative action research, family therapy, educating reflective practitioners- researchers, and cross- cultural evidence- based interventions.