
David Su
I am a first-year PhD student in the Department of Sociology. Prior to coming to Berkeley in 2022, I hold a Mphil in Sociology and Demography from the University of Oxford (with distinction) and graduated (luckily survived) with a BA in Sociology from Wuhan University.
My research interest is twofold. First, I applied survey and computational methods to study how personal networks shape social inequality in health, particularly among minorities and in nonroutine contexts. Second, my research focuses on the dynamics of social movements and the underlying state-society relationship. Accordingly, I am currently pursuing three research projects: (1) a UCNets-based study endeavors to explain why social networks generate undesirable health outcomes for immigrants but not for their US-born counterparts; (2) Cov-Netps, a survey among the college population in Wuhan that examines how network mobilization produces heterogeneous outcomes for different population subgroups during the pandemic; (3) a mixed-method project drawing on archival sources and newspaper-based event history data to study why repressions quell protests in some cases but backfire in others, a much-debated topic in political sociology and political science.