Researches

I was trained as a demographer, and my research examines how socioeconomic resources, family environments, and educational contexts shape disparities in life chances across the life course. My recent publication in Social Science & Medicine investigates how household financial assets are linked to cardiometabolic risk in early adulthood. Other ongoing projects examine how educational trajectories moderate the relationship between sleep and mental health among Chinese adolescents, and how patterns of intergenerational income transmission vary across birth cohorts.

Alongside this, I have developed a growing interest in a prior question: how do the categories we use to study inequality come to exist in the first place? How does the state acquire the capacity to sort people into classifications that then organize their life chances? I am particularly drawn to mobile populations as a site for studying the production of state knowledge, because migrants are the cases where the mechanisms and limits of classification are most exposed.