Hana Shin
Student, PhD in Clinical Psychology

Being an Agent of Healing

Hana Shin, a second-generation Korean American from San Francisco, remembers the moment God prompted her as a young student to ask the question that would become her mission: “How can I, as a person of faith, respond to suffering?”

Hana came to Fuller to work with Assistant Professor of Psychology Cynthia Eriksson in the Headington Program, a research lab that focuses on stress, trauma, and spirituality among missionaries and humanitarian aid workers internationally and locally. In her time at Fuller so far, her work has included addressing self-care among urban missionaries and factors that promote resiliency in adversity. She has worked with a local non-governmental organization in Kenya after the 2008 post-election violence, and with caregivers of Burmese refugee children in Thailand. Through all this and more, she continues to explore “the fundamental question of my professional and theological career: With the multitudes of people groups, languages, technological and sociological changes in the world, how can the Church be an agent of healing?”

Hana has a heart for this work because she has a heart for people. Her journey through Fuller’s clinical psychology program has been, she says, not just an academic exercise but a life-changing experience, because of the people who have intersected her path. “Whether working with children of abuse and trauma, adults and their families dealing with dementia and brain injury, or military veterans from the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, I have been allowed to enter into their journey and use my gifts and training to serve. I have seen and walked through human suffering,” she says, “but also human resilience.”

Learn more about Fuller’s Headington Program, which seeks to address issues of trauma and stress in cross-cultural ministry settings.