Biography and Research Interests

Biography

I was born and grew up in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China. I did my undergraduate work in Beijing University and received the B.A. in Chinese Language and Literature in 1998. A change of scholarly interest from humanities to quantitative social sciences led me to graduate studies at the Ohio State University, where I received the M.A. in Sociology in 2000. I continued my graduate education at Duke University and received the M.S. in Statistics in 2004 and Ph.D. in Sociology in 2005. Before coming to UNC-CH in 2010, I was Assistant Professor at the Sociology Department and Research Associate at the Population Research Center and Center on Aging at NORC at the University of Chicago. I am now Alan Shapiro Distinguished Professor at the Sociology Department and the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center and Faculty Fellow of the Carolina Population Center. I have many other interests such as ballroom dancing, swimming, hiking, power yoga, music, and reading (especially when raining).

Research Interests and Goals

I conduct transdisciplinary research focusing on social disparities in health and aging that crosscuts a range of areas in demography, medical sociology, life course sociology, social epidemiology, and quantitative methodology. My overarching goal is to discover complex patterns and mechanisms of population health disparities and their temporal dynamics and life course variations. In addition, my research aims to explicate the life course process by which social stress contributes to aging related diseases and mortality and the underlying biological pathways, to uncover how it is that exposures and experiences “get under the skin” to manifest in health differences, and to understand and find solutions to problems arising from reciprocal interactions between individuals’ social and physical worlds. My general approaches are to: 1) bring integrative biosocial theoretical perspectives to bear on the analyses of diverse forms of big health data (e.g., vital statistics, sample surveys, and clinical biomarkers); 2) to develop new statistical models and methods for integrative data analyses of the full spectrum of the life course from birth to old age; and 3) to construct a multisystem explanatory framework across levels (cellular, organ, organism, developmental, and behavioral) for understanding mechanisms of health and aging jointly affected by social contexts and biological processes over the life course.

My contributions to science lie in three areas:

1) Biodemography of aging, chronic disease, and mortality: I employed population level data on mortality rates and chronic conditions (e.g., cognitive decline, obesity, disability, depression, cancer, and frailty) and advanced modeling techniques (e.g., age-period-cohort, Strehler and Mildvan, and two-mortality models) to test and extend theories of dynamics of aging and survival, and assess the influences of social historical contexts on these dynamics as well as patterns of population heterogeneity (by gender, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status) therein.

2) Integrative biosocial explanatory framework of social differentials in health over the life course: This line of work breaks new ground with an innovative life-course research design that combines prospective cohort data from multiple large-scale NIH longitudinal studies that collectively cover the entire life span. I used this design integrating health outcomes (e.g., cognitive function, obesity) and novel biomarkers for population-based studies (e.g., C-reactive protein) to jointly examined social and biological explanations for social gradients in health not possible before in studies using a single dataset confined to only one life period (childhood or old age). The body of empirical studies I published made two contributions to the literature on health disparities: the explication of interconnections between social stress (e.g., low socioeconomic status and social isolation) and physiological stress responses (e.g., inflammation and metabolic syndrome) as mechanisms underlying health disparities, and the life-course variation in such interconnections that shape the early-life influences on late-life health (e.g., cognitive aging).

3) New methodological developments for aging and cohort analysis: originating from my dissertation, my methodological studies focus on modeling time related change and its applications in demographic and health research. I have been continuously engaged in developing and testing new statistical models and methods for studying cohort changes in various directions well beyond her earlier work. These new models and methods are united by a generalized linear mixed models framework that can be flexibly applied across different data structures and study designs and are increasingly used in a wide range of disciplines.

(Last updated in June, 2023)