Dr. Hong is currently an Associate Professor of Neurobiology, Biological Chemistry, and Bioengineering at the University of California Los Angeles. Dr. Hong received his PhD degree in 2012 at Stanford University where he studied the molecular mechanism of wiring specificity during neural development. He was a Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Fellow at the California Institute of Technology studying neural mechanisms of social and emotional behavior. He joined UCLA in 2016 as Assistant Professor and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2020. He is also the recipient of a Young Investigator Award from the Society for Neuroscience, an Early Career Award from the Society for Social Neuroscience, a Mallinkrodt Scholar Award, a Vallee Scholar Award, a Searle Scholar Award, a Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering, a McKnight Scholar Award, a Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship, and a Sloan Research Fellowship.​