Dr. Lucinda Leung earned her Bachelor of Arts at Dartmouth, Doctor of Medicine at Brown, Master of Public Health at Harvard, and Doctor of Philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles, and completed a fellowship through the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Veterans Affairs (VA) Clinical Scholars Program. She is also a board-certified Clinical Informatics subspecialist. She practices as a Staff Physician at VA Greater Los Angeles  Healthcare System, where she educates medical students and residents on hospital medicine, as well as cares for veterans in primary care clinic.

Dr. Leung studies how to optimize mental health care delivery for primary care populations through interdisciplinary teams and virtual technologies. She collaborates with patients, clinicians, and healthcare leaders to improve care integration and uses a mixed-methods (quantitative/qualitative) research approach. She has published in leading peer-reviewed journals (e.g., Annals of Internal Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association [JAMA] series), been interviewed by major news media (e.g., Los Angeles Times) and been awarded >$5 million in federal funding (e.g., VA, National Institutes of Health [NIH]). Her research and expert testimony have been cited in U.S. congressional and other federal reports (e.g., Government Accountability Office) and selected annually for briefing to VA’s Under Secretary for Health. In 2023, Dr. Leung was named by the National Academy of Medicine as 1 of 10  Emerging Leaders in Health & Medicine Scholars in the U.S..

Growing up in an immigrant household, Dr. Leung entered school as an English learner and became the first in her family to attend college and then medical school. She was attracted to a general internal medicine practice because it offered both physical and mental health care to underserved patients, much like those in the communities where she was raised. Currently, she levies her expertise in health services research and implementation science to improve care for depression, which is the leading cause of disability worldwide and which requires a global and interdisciplinary approach to innovation.