Mary L. Peng is a Master of Public Health Candidate in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Yale School of Public Health. Peng is deeply passionate about patient-centered care, whole-person care, and preventive healthcare, committed to embedding equity-driven health tech, mobile health(mHealth), and user-centered digital health solutions into an integrated healthcare ecosystem customized to every patient. Her current mHealth and health informatics research focuses on HIV prevention, chronic disease management, and mental health improvement.

Much of her research also explores the integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning to augment digital health interventions. Working under Dr. Terika McCall, Peng joined the Consumer Health Informatics Lab in February 2022. In addition, she works with Dr. Federick Altice and Dr. Zhao Ni on the NSL-funded research and development of AI-powered anti-HIV chatbots in Malaysia. Peng also works at Dr. Ashley Hagaman’s Innovation Lab at the Yale Center for Methods in Implementation and Prevention Science (CMIPS), where her team conducts systematic scoping reviews to understand the different implementation strategies to improve implementation of evidence-based practices as well as various implementation outcomes and how they are assessed.

Besides research, Peng serves as the Communication and Marketing Executive Director of Yale Healthcare Conference 2022, a site selection and feasibility consultant at Yale Center for Clinical Investigation, and previously as a service implementation consultant for Connecticut Hospice, America's first hospice established in 1974. Peng is also a self-taught digital artist featured on Adobe Photoshop’s official social media page and has 8+ years of experience in graphic design, during which she designed for 25 international and domestic organizations and corporations spanning across Jamaica, Singapore, Cambodia, China, the US, and Kenya. Peng is also an adamant champion of mindful living, empathy, and holistic well-being, and aspires to merge the sensorial experience of art with the creative capacity of health technology to create digital health tools.

Peng received her B.A. from the University of Virginia in 2021, where she majored in Global Studies and double minored in Anthropology and Philosophy. In the early stage of Peng’s undergraduate career, she conducted two years of ethnographic research on social belonging, intersectionality-informed social power dynamics, and identity politics, culminating in three ethnographic portfolios. Under the guidance of Dr. Richard L Merkel Jr., Peng conducted research on patients’ acceptance of tele-psychiatry during COVID-19 and presented her research at the Mid-Atlantic Telehealth Resource Center Summit 2021. Peng was awarded the Horstmann Scholarship at Yale, and received the Catherine F. Underwood Murray '89 Scholarship 2020-2021 and the Lorna Sundberg International Scholarship Award 2020 for outstanding dedication to community service and academic performance. She was also the recipient of the four-year Singapore Ministry of Education Senior-Middle 1 (SM1) Scholarship 2013-2018.
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Mary has a black belt in taekwondo.