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The 2024 Beverley Raphael New Investigator grant recipients
24 Mar 2025
Grants & awards
The 2024 Beverley Raphael New Investigator Grant was awarded to five promising young researchers. Here are two of the recipients.
Dr Yoon Kwon Choi
Project: Barriers in accessing health care and support for Korean speaking people in Australia with intellectual disability or autism spectrum disorder: A qualitative analysis.
A 2022 scoping review highlighted the challenges faced by culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) populations at individual, community, and systemic levels within Australia’s universal healthcare system. More than 100,000 people in Australia were born in the Republic of Korea, yet no studies have explored the healthcare access experiences of Korean Australians with intellectual disabilities or autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
The National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) recently released its CALD Strategy for 2024-2028, but Korean-speaking communities were not engaged in its development. This project seeks to address this gap by exploring the experiences of Korean Australians who support individuals with intellectual disabilities or ASD in accessing healthcare and related services. Dr. Choi will conduct a qualitative analysis of interviews with Korean-speaking caregivers and families.
Dr. Choi is a psychiatry registrar at the Queensland centre of excellence for autism and intellectual disability at Mater Hospital.
"It is a great privilege to be awarded the RANZCP Beverly Raphel New Investigator Grant. It is very exciting to be provided the opportunity and position to give back to the community that I have grown up in. We greatly look forward to bridging the gap in knowledge on how to better support people with disability in our multicultural society."
Dr Yoon Kwon Choi
Dr Hannah Suh
Project: Parents’ experiences of Family-Based Treatment for Anorexia Nervosa in East Asian adolescents in New Zealand.
Current evidence and College guidelines recommend Family-Based Treatment (FBT) or alternative family therapies as the treatment of choice for Anorexia Nervosa (AN) in children and adolescents.
However, few studies have explored the effectiveness of family-based treatments in Asian adolescents with AN.
This qualitative research is designed to explore the experiences of East-Asian parents whose adolescent children received or are receiving family-based treatment for anorexia nervosa, the first-line treatment in Aotearoa.
Using semi-structured interviews, we will explore barriers to treatment engagement, which is important given the growing East Asian population in Aotearoa and their increasing use of eating disorder services compared to other ethnic groups.
Dr Suh is a Psychiatry Registrar from Aotearoa, Te Whatu Ora, and lead investigator of research at the University of Auckland.
“This is an under-served population in research in Aotearoa, particularly eating disorder research. We want to identify knowledge gaps regarding the cultural factors that may either facilitate or hinder engagement with treatment”.
Dr Hannah Suh
The Beverley Raphael New Investigator Grant is designed to encourage those who are new to research and require funding to conduct a small-scale study.
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