I am a political sociologist in training. Prior to coming to Berkeley, I held a Soc-demography Mphil from the University of Oxford (with distinction) and graduated (luckily survived) with a sociology degree from mainland China.
My main research interest is twofold. First, I applied survey and computational methods to study how individuals use social networks for gathering resources in non-routine contexts. Second, my research focuses on the dynamics of social movements and the underlying state-society relationship. Accordingly, I am currently pursuing the following research projects: (1) Social Network and the reproduction of health inequality: a UCNets-based study endeavors to explain why social networks generate undesirable health outcomes for immigrants but not for their US-born counterparts; (2) Dynamics of Contention: a mixed-method project drawing on archival sources and newspaper-based event history data to study why repressions quell social movements in some cases but backfire in others, a much-debated topic in political sociology and political science. As a graduate student instructor, I am strongly interested in the aftermath of the 2022 UAW strike across the University of California system, still trying to figure out why we collectively failed to get the expected pay rise.