People
Faculty
Jennie Brand
Jennie E. Brand is Professor of Sociology and Statistics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She is Director of the California Center for Population Research (CCPR) and Co-Director of the Center for Social Statistics (CSS) at UCLA. She is Chair of the Methodology Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA), Chair-Elect of the Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Section of ASA, and an elected Board Member of the International Sociological Association (ISA) Research Committee on Social Stratification and Mobility (RC28). She previously served on the councils of the ASA Methodology, Sociology of Education, and Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility sections. She was elected to the Sociological Research Association (SRA), an honor society for excellence in research, in 2019, and received the ASA Methodology Leo Goodman Mid-Career Award in 2016, and honorable mention for the ASA Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility William Julius Wilson Mid-Career Award in 2014. Prof. Brand is a member of the Technical Review Committee for the National Longitudinal Surveys Program at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. She was previously a member of the Board of Overseers of the General Social Survey (GSS). She is Associate Editor of AAAS’s Science Advances, the open access extension of Science magazine, and serves on the editorial boards of Social Forces, Sociological Methodology, Sociological Methods and Research, Sociological Science, and Sociology Compass. She also previously served on the boards of American Sociological Review, Demography, and SAGE Research Methods. Prof. Brand studies social stratification and inequality, mobility, social demography, education, and methods for causal inference.
Nanum Jeon
Nanum Jeon is a Ph.D. student of Sociology and M.S. student of Statistics at UCLA. She is also a student affiliate of the California Center for Population Research. Nanum Jeon specializes in the areas of social stratification and gender inequality. Her research interests include (1) how disruptive events, such as job displacement, influence individuals, paying close attention to their labor market outcomes; (2) how social conditions, particularly cultural norms and the division of household labor, shape gender ideology and inequality; and (3) causal inference, quantitative and computational methods.
Tanvi Shinkre
Tanvi Shinkre is a Ph.D. student in Statistics at UCLA, and a student affiliate of the California Center for Population Research. Her main research interests are in causal inference and social statistics, with a focus on analyzing different types of bias that arise in causal effect estimation. She is also interested in applications of causal methods in public policy settings.
Christina Wilmot
Christina Wilmot is a Ph.D. student in sociology at UCLA. Previously, she studied computer science and worked as a software engineer at Google. She is interested in the varying intersections of technology and society, including using novel computational methods to analyze social information, studying online social behavior, and looking at the effects of the adoption of new technologies on a society. She also aims to make computational methods more accessible to social researchers from a variety of substantive and methodological fields.Speakers
Zack Almquist
Zack W. Almquist is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, Adjunct Associate Professor of Statistics, and Senior Data Science Fellow at the eScience Institute at the University of Washington. Before coming to UW in 2020, Prof. Almquist held positions as a Research Scientist at Facebook, Inc and as an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Statistics at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Almquist is a recipient of the American Sociological Association’s Section on Methodology’s Leo Goodman Award. He is also a recipient of the NSF’s CAREER Award and the ARO’s Young Investigator Program Award. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Mathematical Sociology. His research centers on the development and application of mathematical, computational and statistical methodology to problems and theory of social networks, demography, homelessness, and environmental action and governance.
Onyebuchi A. Arah
Onyebuchi ("Onyi") Arah, MD, MSc, MPH, DSc, PhD, is a Professor of Epidemiology at the Fielding School of Public Health, an Affiliated Professor in the Department of Statistics, and an Associated Dean of Graduate Education at the Division of Graduate Education, at UCLA. He has served as President-Elect and is now President of the Society for Epidemiologic Research (SER). An internationally renowned scholar, he is also Honorary Skou Professor at Aarhus University in Denmark. He is the Chair of the Epidemiology Doctoral Qualifying Examination Committee. He has served as Director of the Center for Global and Immigrant Health and Associate Dean at the Fielding School of Public Health. He has received several research, teaching, and service awards, including the Council of Science Editors Award (hosted by Fogarty International, NIH) for outstanding contributions to global health policy and practice, the European Society for Philosophy, Medicine and Health Care’s First Prize for Young Scholars under age 35 who have made innovative contributions to the philosophy of medicine and health care, the Causality in Statistics Education Award from the American Statistical Association, an Honorary Skou Professorship in Epidemiology, Health Policy and Biostatistics from Aarhus University in Denmark, and the Academic Council Chairs Award for Mid-Career Leadership from the University of California Systemwide Academic Senate. In addition to serving on the editorial boards of epidemiology, public health, and interdisciplinary science journals, he regularly reviews manuscripts for biostatistics, epidemiology, general medicine, and public health journals. His research areas include causal inference, quantitative bias analysis, computational epidemiology, population health data science, and reproductive, pediatric, perinatal, occupational, clinical, and social epidemiology.
Alina Arseniev-Koehler
Alina Arseniev-Koehler (she/her) is a National Library of Medicine T15 Postdoctoral Trainee at the University of California, San Diego in the Division of Biomedical Informatics. She is also an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Purdue University (currently on leave for this postdoctoral training). Alina is a computational social scientist who studies culture and social categorization, and their intersections with health. She is specialized in natural language processing. Alina received her Ph.D. in Sociology from UCLA in 2022. During her PhD, she participated in SICSS-University of Washington and subsequently co-organized SICSS-Los Angeles.
Ryan Cho
Ryan is a Research Scientist in the Demography and Survey Science Division (DSS) at Meta Platforms. In this role, he conducts research on company sentiment to help inform and drive decisions made by executive leadership. Ryan received his PhD in Sociology from UCLA supervised under Prof. Jennie Brand and holds an AB in Political Science from Columbia University.Duncan Clark
Duncan currently a Data Engineer/Scientist at Atalan Tech. He works to build infrastructure and test models supporting machine learning based prediction of clinician burnout. Previously, he was employed at Meta, as a Research Data Scientist in the infrastructure group. Duncan was part of the mass layoffs at Meta in May 2023. Duncan received his PhD from the UCLA Statistics Department in June 2022 under the guidance of Prof. Mark Handcock. His PhD research pertained to network generation processes, Bayesian social network models and causal inference for social networks. In general he is interested in problems where applying an "off the shelf" method does not yield sensible results.
Jiale Han
Jiale Han is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Statistics at UCLA. Previously, he received my B.S. in Mathematics from University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2022. In the fall of 2021, he also attended Columbia University as an exchange student in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. His research interests are focused on statistical machine learning theory. Currently, he is a member of the Lab for Statistics, Computing, Algorithms, Learning, and Economics (SCALE) at UCLA. Under the supervision of Prof. Xiaowu Dai, he is conducting research on machine learning and economics. Specifically, his current focus is on studying mechanism design in auctions.
Mark S. Handcock
Mark S. Handcock is Professor of Statistics in the Department of Statistics and Data Science. His research involves methodological development, and is based largely on motivation from questions in the social sciences, social epidemiology and environmetrics. Recent work focuses on statistical models for social networks, the development of statistical methodology for the collection and analysis of social network data, surveying of hard-to-sample populations, spatial processes and demography.
Jiayi Li
Jiayi Li is currently a 4-th year Ph.D. student in the department of statistics at UCLA. Prior to that, she did bachelors in mathematics at the University of Hong Kong and SUNY, Stony Brook. Jiayi's research is centered around statistical learning theory. In particular, she studies the training and optimization process of neural networks, seeking to understand how parametrization and algorithms influence the expressive power and generalization ability of neural networks.
Ian Lundberg
Ian Lundberg is an Assistant Professor of Information Science at Cornell University. His research develops statistical methods and applies those methods to questions about inequality, poverty, and mobility. After completing his PhD in sociology at Princeton University, Ian spent one year as a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Sociology at UCLA. Ian enjoys hiking, surfing, and making oatmeal with blueberries.
Natasha Quadlin
Natasha Quadlin is an Associate Professor of Sociology at UCLA. Her research examines social inequality in the contemporary United States, with an emphasis on inequality in access and returns to education. She is particularly interested in using large-scale experiments and surveys to examine the mechanisms behind inequalities in schools, families, and labor markets. Other projects use experimental methods to examine public attitudes, and how these attitudes are linked with inequalities on account of gender, social class, race, and other characteristics.
Wenlu Xu
Wenlu Xu is currently a first year PhD student at the UCLA Department of Statistics. She receives her bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from Shandong University. She is under the guidance of Dr. Xiaowu Dai. Her research interests include (1) recommender system; (2) causal inference; (3) machine learning in economics. She is currently a member of the Lab for Statistics, Computing, Algorithm, Learning, and Economics (SCALE).Teaching Assistants
Participants
Bernadette Blashill
Bernadette Blashill is a doctoral student in Sociology at Harvard University. Her research interests center on mental health inequities in the United States, with a focus on the intersection of law, race/ethnicity, and trauma. She is currently a research assistant at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Prior to pursuing graduate school, Bernadette worked in asylum and disability law in the Bay Area for three years, and after as a Policy & Research Analyst in educational equity for Catalyst California. She also contributed to two UC Berkeley studies investigating economic precarity, race, and the social impact of COVID-19 in California.
Taylor Brown
Taylor Brown is a PhD Student with the School of Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests lay at the intersections of climate change and social policy using computational, comparative, and critical methods, and his current research examines the U.S. eco-social safety net and the impacts of climate change on the U.S. welfare state. Taylor is currently affiliated with the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, the Social Science Data Laboratory and Discovery Hub, and the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry at UC Berkeley. Taylor holds an MSW from Washington University in St. Louis and has informed social and environmental policy through a number of advocacy, administrative, and consulting roles.
Yvonne Carrillo
Yvonne Carrillo is a PhD student at the University of California, Los Angeles. She studies the housing and labor strategies of Latinx immigrants in California using in-depth interviews. She seeks to use computational methods to examine residential mobility differences by race/ethnicity, immigration status, and income.
Jon Benedik Bunquin
Jon Benedik Bunquin is a doctoral student in communication and media studies at the University of Oregon as a scholar of the Fulbright program. His research explores science and risk communication in digital media and its implications on people's understanding of and engagement with science and technology. Ben is affiliated with the UO Center for Science Communication Research and the University of Philippines Department of Communication Research.
Joshua Ferrer
Joshua Ferrer is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles, with concentrations in American politics, methods, and racial and ethic politics. His research focuses on the link between electoral institutions and representation, partisanship, and participation, with a special emphasis on U.S. election administration and local and state election officials. His work has been published in The American Political Science Review, Representation, and Political Science.
Bing Han
Bing Han is a dual-title PhD in Sociology and Gerontology from Purdue University. She has also obtained two graduate certificates in Advanced Methodology from Purdue and in Applied Statistics. Her research focuses on how childhood experiences, gender, and social relationships influence health behaviors and outcomes throughout the life course.
Eleanor Hayes-Larson
Eleanor Hayes-Larson is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Epidemiology at UCLA. Her research takes a lifecourse perspective to study psychosocial determinants of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias in diverse populations, with an emphasis on groups historically underrepresented in research.
Tate Kihara
Tate Kihara is a JSPS Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The University of Tokyo. Social demographer by training, he studies international migration and immigrant integration in both historical and contemporary settings, in the regional contexts of Japan and the United States. He recently received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Brown University.
Tracy Lam-Hine
Tracy Lam-Hine (he/him), DrPH, MBA, is a postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford in Epidemiology and Population Health. His research focuses on improving the measurement of structural racism, the health of Multiracial people in the United States, and the application of methods in social epidemiology to racial health inequities.
Gabriel León
Gabriel León is a PhD student in Clinical Psychology at the University of Southern California (USC) and a member of the Neuroendocrinology of Social Ties (NEST) Lab. He studies the dynamic, biopsychosocial processes by which acute and chronic stress is regulated within complex social systems (e.g., families). As a clinical scientist, Gabriel aims to leverage multimodal biobehavioral data streams to inform the development of personalized interventions for minoritized parents and children.
XunFei Li
XunFei("Shoon-Fay") Li is a Ph.D. candidate at the UC Irvine School of Education. Using large-scale data, she constructs measures to examine how institutional factors impact student pathways in higher education. She explores the influence of curriculum structure/policy on student outcomes and conducts interventions to investigate how group composition affects student behaviors.
Kristin Liao
Kristin Liao is a PhD student in Sociology and MS student in Statistics at UCLA. Being trained as a social demographer, her research focuses on the stratification and mobility of immigrants and other sociodemographic minorities in the American educational system, labor market and families. Kristen's ambition is to bridge the fields of stratification and immigration, incorporating stratification theories and methods into the study of immigrant integration and intergenerational mobility and highlighting the often overlooked role of immigration in classic status attainment models.
Yujia Liu
Yujia is a Ph.D. candidate in Education Policy at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on understanding social and educational inequality in schools and homes, with an emphasis on policies and programs that support teacher recruitment, development, and retention and their relationship to student learning environments.
Sisi Peng
Sisi Peng is currently pursuing a PhD in Communication at UCLA. Her research focuses on women’s health, and she is interested in applications of big data in understanding health issues. She holds an MPH in Health Policy & Management from SUNY Downstate and a BS in Communication from Cornell University.
Tyler Reny
Tyler is an assistant professor in the Department of Politics and Government at Claremont Graduate University. He received his PhD in political science from UCLA and held a post-doctoral research fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis. His work uses a variety of methods and datasets to investigate politically salient questions related to inequality.
Shiva Rouhani
Shiva Rouhani is a doctoral student in the UCLA Sociology department, and is associated with the California Center for Population Research. She is broadly interested in inequality and intergenerational mobility. Her dissertation explores the classed pathways of career lines. Shiva holds an MA in Sociology from UCLA and an MA in Applied Quantitative Research from NYU. Prior to beginning her PhD, Shiva worked as a research assistant for the Future of Families and Wellbeing Study.
Will Schupmann
Will is a PhD student in sociology at UCLA. His research examines the social forces shaping how healthcare professionals provide services, and how patients gain access. His most recent projects include a qualitative study investigating the social position ethics consultants hold within hospitals and a network analysis study investigating the diffusion of elective obstetric interventions. Prior to enrolling in graduate school, Will conducted empirical bioethics research at the National Institutes of Health.
Ke Shen
Ke Shen is a PhD student at Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, and a Graduate Research Assistant with Information Sciences Institute, both are units of USC Viterbi School of Engineering. Ke started her PhD in 2021, advised by Dr. Mayank Kejriwal. Ke's research interest lies in the intersection between knowledge graph and natural language processing. Her current focus is language model and its application in commonsense reasoning, especially for multiple-choice question answering tasks.
Justin Sola
Justin Sola is a PhD candidate at UC Irvine’s Criminology, Law & Society program, with a Race and Justice emphasis. His research focuses on how the criminal justice system interacts with inequality and the origins of security-seeking behaviors like gun ownership. He is affiliated with the National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research, a member of the Irvine Laboratory for the Study of Space and Crime, and is a researcher on the Shadow Costs project - which tests the impact of rehabilitation classes and monetary sanctions.
Xiaoqian (Clare) Wan
Xiaoqian (Clare) Wan is a doctoral student in sociology at Brown University. Her research interests include economic sociology, race, and migration. Her dissertation examines the formation of global markets between China and Africa, using archival data and conducting interviews and participant observations with African diaspora in China. Before attending graduate school, she earned her M.A. degree from the University of Chicago and her B.A. from Zhejiang University in China. Her current computational social science project involves analyzing Chinese state newspaper texts to trace the evolution of market ideologies.
Hsiu-yu Yang
Hsiu-yu is a doctoral student in sociology at UCLA. She is affiliated with the California Center for Population Research (CCPR). Her research focuses on fertility, family dynamics, and reproductive health. Hsiu-yu obtained an MA in sociology and dual bachelor's degrees in journalism and sociology from National Chengchi University in Taiwan.
Xiaoya Zhang
Xiaoya Zhang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Family, Youth and Community Sciences at the University of Florida. She obtained her PhD in human development from UC Davis. Her research concerns how environmental and personal factors shape children’s development using both traditional statistical approaches and computational methods.