Internationally recognized for her expertise with forcibly displaced children and families, she has spent more than two decades designing, implementing, and advising on mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) systems in conflict-affected and humanitarian settings across sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and the United States.

Dr. Song has served as a mental-health advisor to multiple U.S. federal agencies including the Departments of State, Justice, and Homeland Security, and has provided Congressional briefings on trauma-informed policy, child protection, and human trafficking.

She has led field and policy work with former child soldiers in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Burundi; with forcibly displaced families in Ethiopia, Haiti, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Syrian refugee camps in Jordan; and has provided clinical care for survivors of torture, hostage, human trafficking, and mass violence. Her work has shaped national mental-health policies, frontline responder training, and multisectoral systems for vulnerable and conflict-affected populations.

Dr. Song's debut trade book, Why We Suffer and How We Heal (Harmony / Penguin Random House, 2026), offers a groundbreaking framework for navigating instability and transforming suffering through narrative, ritual, meaning, and connection. She is frequently invited as a keynote speaker for academic institutions, philanthropic foundations, global organizations, and major companies - including Google, Harvard, Stanford, and U.S. federal agencies. She also co-edited Child and Adolescent Refugee Mental Health: A Global Perspective with the senior mental health officer of the U.N. Refugee Agency.

As professor of psychiatry at George Washington University and former visiting professor at Harvard, Dr. Song established the Global Child and Family Mental Health program at Boston Children's Hospital. She also founded the Global Collective Institute, a nonprofit advancing MHPSS for children in humanitarian settings, and has been a lead contributor to global operational frameworks for UNICEF, UNHCR, and International Medical Corps. She supports governments and humanitarian organizations integrate mental health into education, protection, and public-health infrastructures.

She holds an M.D. from the University of Chicago, and Ph.D. in social-behavioral medicine from the University of Amsterdam, focused on intergenerational stress and resilience in former child soldiers in Burundi. She also earned an M.P.H. in health policy from the Harvard School of Public Health, and completed her general psychiatry residency at Harvard Medical Centers and her pediatric psychiatry fellowship from Stanford.

Before becoming a physician, she earned her B.S. with high honors and Phi Beta Kappa honors from the University of Michigan, where she had a dual degree in biology and epistemology across cultures - a self-designed concentration within the Residential College. She has received awards for distinguished clinical care or scholarly achievement from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatrists (AACAP), American Psychiatric Association (APA), Northern California Region of Child/Adolescent Psychiatrists (NC-ROCAP), International Association for Child and Adolescent Psychiatrists and Allied Professionals (IACAPAP), National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH), Harvard University, and George Washington University.

Clinically after training, she was medical director of Asian Americans for Community Involvement, provided clinical care in survivor of torture programs across the U.S., and was medical director of Alternative Family Services in the SF Bay Area, caring for children in foster care with advanced mental health needs. She has maintained a private practice for twenty years, supporting high-profile politicians, business and tech executives as well as survivors of hostage, human trafficking and torture.

Her work integrates neuroscience, storytelling, and global mental health to help individuals, families, and systems navigate uncertainty, heal from trauma, and create purposeful paths forward.