Hayoung is a dual doctoral student at the Graduate Center at City University of New York where she studies environmental psychology and critical social and personality psychology. After completing BFA in Fine Arts, from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she worked on various community psychology labs studying homelessness, violence prevention, and substance use. She is interested in various dimensions of inequality organized in space, particularly geographic contexts across neighborhoods such as safety, natural environment, peer groups, social control, institutions, social networks, and job accessibility. She is currently a research associate with the Housing Environments Research Group (HERG) in the Center for Human Environments.