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Christine Yung Hung

Christine Yung Hung
Professor

Department of Agricultural Economics
Department of Food technology, Safety and Health
Ghent University
Coupure links 653
9000 Ghent, Belgium
 yung.hung@ugent.be

Bio

Prof. Christine Yung Hung is affiliated with both the Department of Agricultural Economics and Department of Food technology, Safety and Health. Her work focuses on the intersection of behavioural economics, public health nutrition and agro-food marketing. She is also a Behavioural Science and Education Specialist at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations; an external reviewer and monitor for projects funded by the European Commission. Before joining academia, she was a nutritionist in the pharmaceutical industry, and a voluntary researcher in the domain of obesity and cancer at the Association of European Cancer Leagues (ECL). Currently, she is chairing UGent’s ASEAN & South Asia regional platform to foster international collaborations.
She received a PhD in Applied Biological Sciences (Doctor of Bioscience Engineering): Food Science and Nutrition from Ghent University. As the awardee of the Food Policy Prize by the Royal Academy of Medicine in Belgium, her dissertation was titled ‘Consumer-Driven Development of Policy Actions to Improve Food Choice: The Cases of Health Claim Regulation and Product Reformulation’. She obtained an MSc degree in Nutrition and Rural Development (Nutrition and Food Systems), major in Public Health Nutrition from Ghent University and a BSc degree in Food Science and Technology from Monash University with trainings in business administration.

Research

Her work is often of an interdisciplinary nature, focusing on food-related decision-making and behavioural interventions. Mixed-methods are used to explore how psycho-socioeconomic (e.g. personal background, attitudes) and external (e.g. policy interventions, marketing strategies) factors shape food choices and agrifood production practices, the eventual health outcomes and environmental impacts. Her expertise include large-scale surveys, living labs, information tests, economic experiments with sensory evaluations, focus groups and advanced data modelling.