Fung Fellowship End of Year Showcase 2026

The University of California, San Francisco Quit the Hit Program is a digital vaping cessation initiative designed to help young adults quit nicotine use. It uses text messaging, personalized coaching, and behavioral strategies to support users through cravings and withdrawal. The program emphasizes harm reduction and gradual change rather than strict abstinence from the start. It is research-backed and tailored to meet the needs of teens and young adults, especially those using e-cigarettes.

This project focuses on improving retention among young adults transitioning off their parents’ Kaiser Permanente plans, a moment where many disengage despite familiarity with the system. Research with 40+ Gen‑Z users revealed that confusing insurance terminology, competing financial priorities, and administrative hurdles cause significant friction, with most participants delaying action, misunderstanding plan options, or remaining uninsured past coverage end. Many lack guidance from parents or institutions and adopt a passive, reactive approach, treating insurance as a background safety net rather than an active tool for managing health. Our “Aging‑Off Hub” prototype addresses these challenges with a personalized, in‑app checklist, one‑click actions, and optional contextual reminders to guide users through the transition and increase confidence and timely completion of coverage steps.

Kaiser Companion is an AI-powered healthcare companion app designed to help Gen Z members navigate health insurance with confidence. Born from user research revealing that young adults struggle with basic insurance terminology, unexpected costs, and opaque healthcare systems, the app offers personalized guidance through features like a Jargon Buster, pre-visit checklists, and a plain-language AI chat. By meeting users at high-anxiety moments, after booking an appointment, when a bill arrives, or when estimating costs Kaiser Companion replaces the cycle of Googling and guessing with clear, plan-specific support directly within the Kaiser Permanente experience.

This project, developed in collaboration with Kaiser Permanente, explores how to better support older adults’ mental health and overall wellbeing by addressing the everyday barriers they face in managing care. Through interviews and concept testing, the team found that many older members struggle not only with digital navigation, but also with feelings of confusion, dependence, and social isolation when trying to book appointments, manage prescriptions, and follow through on care. In response, the project is developing concepts that build on Kaiser’s existing portal, including guided care to provide calm, personalized assistance and a “Circle” recommendation concept to encourage meaningful, low pressure social connection. Together, these ideas aim to make healthcare access feel more supportive, empowering, and emotionally sustaining for elderly adults.

Vaping is highly prevalent among young adults and poses significant health risks, yet evidence-based cessation interventions remain scarce. To address this gap, we are working with the UCSF HEARTY lab and developing an AI-powered chatbot designed to help young adults reduce and quit vaping through personalized, theory-informed behavioral coaching.

The chatbot is grounded in the COM-B (Capability, Opportunity, Motivation, and Behavior) model and uses structured backend prompts to select from a curated library of response templates while tailoring messages to each user’s name, triggers, motivations, and situational context. Development follows established UX design principles, progressing from low-fidelity prototypes to a high-fidelity, deployable product, with iterative team review to ensure accuracy, safety, and theoretical alignment.

Our project focuses on improving how Kaiser members (particularly younger members) access information about their plan, coverage, and the benefits that come with it. Currently, we are thinking of designing a cost estimation tool that would go in their portal to help them clearly see what their future appointment will cost and how much of their deductible they have left to pay. Although this is just one of our ideas, so nothing is finalized, our final product may differ. But overall, this is what we are focusing on: Improving the understanding of coverage and benefits by making information easier to access and making the process more efficient for the user.

For health-conscious adults living with prediabetes or insulin resistance, eating out is a source of constant anxiety due to the hidden sugars, misleading ‘light’ labels, and generic nutrition advice that leave users guessing at the exact moment it matters most. INSO exists to meet users at that moment of decision, delivering the confidence that what they’re choosing is actually moving them in the right direction towards their health goals. INSO is an AI-powered app that analyzes restaurant menus in real time, surfacing hidden ingredients and personalized recommendations based on each user’s specific health condition with no logging required.

CA DHCS has partnered with Kooth to provide all Californians (13–25 years old) with Soluna, a free mental health coaching platform, under the California Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative. Many users, who are actively stressed but not classified as “mentally ill,” are skeptical of state-funded programs, concerned about privacy, and confused about cost transparency. We propose redesigning Soluna’s app interface to restore user trust and reduce friction by providing comprehensive information through an intuitive user experience, ensuring this fully funded service is seamlessly accessible to anyone.

This project aims to transform hidden opioid industry documents into engaging, accessible social media content that exposes pharmaceutical marketing practices and their role in the opioid crisis. In addition to document analysis, we conduct interviews with individuals with lived experience, including people in recovery, those who have lost loved ones to overdose, and professionals working in harm reduction and overdose prevention. By combining personal narratives with systemic evidence, our goal is to humanize the crisis, challenge stigma, and increase public awareness in communities that may feel disconnected from its impact.

Navigating Care is a student-led project aimed at reducing anxiety and improving shared decision-making for first-time pregnant women in the United States. Through extensive user research and interviews, the team identified that mothers consistently feel overwhelmed, unheard, and unprepared during prenatal appointments – often forgetting questions and lacking a unified system to track their concerns. The solution is a voice-first Al companion that allows mothers to capture questions and symptoms hands-free as they arise, automatically organizing them before appointments and keeping medical providers and partners informed. Unlike existing pregnancy apps that focus on passive content delivery or manual tracking dashboards, Navigating Care prioritizes emotional warmth, frictionless interaction, and precision medicine to help mothers feel like active participants in their own!

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife is working to manage and track the spread of chronic wasting disease (CWD) throughout the state. Samples of lymph nodes are sent to the department’s lab, where they are subsampled to test for CWD. This point of subsampling is the focal point of our project. Limiting waste, decreasing the risk of cross-contamination between samples, and increasing station efficiency are all essential to better tracking the spread of this disease.

Many Bay Area residents care deeply about climate change but struggle to identify meaningful actions beyond basic habits, while local policymakers lack accessible tools to evaluate county-level policy effectiveness. In partnership with Act Now Bay Area, our team is developing an interactive climate dashboard that translates complex greenhouse gas data from sources like CARB and BAAQMD into clear, localized insights for two audiences: the general public and county-level policymakers. The dashboard features a dual-mode interface — a Simple Mode that connects emissions data to relatable everyday actions, and an Expert Mode with historical trend analysis, county comparisons, and a policy simulator that models the projected impact of interventions like building electrification and EV infrastructure expansion. Our design decisions are grounded in primary research including expert interviews with urban planners, climate scientists, and data communication specialists, as well as a community survey of over 60 Bay Area residents.

Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) has been an ongoing case amongst cervids and other organisms affecting them neurologically, causing brain degeneration, weight loss, behavioral problems, and death. This threatens the wildlife population, affecting population dynamics and poses a risk to the health of our ecosystem. In order to implement regulations in response to these detections and preventions protocol, we’ve partnered up with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to improve on their CWD sampling process for a more compact sampling workflow prototype that reduces cross-contamination, minimizes waste, and improve efficiency in CWD lymph node processing. We aim to implement a new design incorporating accessible and low cost equipment while ensuring the use of PPE.

This project focuses on developing a low-cost, scalable methane sensing system to support real-time monitoring of emissions in urban and industrial environments. In collaboration with Climate Action California, the goal is to design a portable device capable of detecting methane leaks and transmitting data for analysis, enabling faster identification of emission hotspots. By improving accessibility to reliable environmental data, this system aims to support climate mitigation efforts and inform more effective policy and infrastructure decisions. The project emphasizes practical deployment, data-driven insights, and potential scalability for broader environmental monitoring applications.

ReFED is a U.S.-based nonprofit working to solve food waste.

We’re an engine for change, known for our deep sector knowledge, broad convening power, and collaboration across supply chains and sectors—serving as a driver and connector for the movement and a central resource on the topic.

Food waste is a systemwide problem, so we work with businesses, funders, policymakers, researchers, and more to increase the adoption of food waste solutions. The good news is that many effective solutions already exist—and that means food waste is a problem that we can actually solve.

This project, in collaboration with ReFed, aims to reduce food waste generated by students in and around the UC Berkeley campus. Our initiative centers student accessibility to resources, structural barriers, and highlighting “invisible issues” that cause excess food waste and harm the Berkeley environment. To assess this issue, we are developing a campaign for the Berkeley Zero Waste Initiative and City Council, and presenting these ideas at the next Climate Commission Meeting.