PEOPLE

PRINCIPLE INVESTIGATORS

Email: mxliu [at] um.edu.mo

MINGXUAN LIU

Mingxuan Liu (PhD, University of Southern California) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at University of Macau. Her research investigates how emerging technologies shape user behavior, health, and well-being, with a focus on entertainment media. Her work has been published in flagship peer-reviewed journals in Communication, including Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, New Media & Society, Media Psychology, Health Communication, Computers in Human Behavior, Mobile Media & Communication, Journalism Studies, among others. Her work has also received several Top Paper Awards at the International Communication Association (ICA) and the National Communication Association (NCA), the two major scholarly associations in the field. She currently serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Games and is a member of the editorial board of Global Perspectives in Communication, one of the seven journals published by the International Communication Association.

Email: chihuali [at] um.edu.mo

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CHIHUA LI

Chihua Li is an Assistant Professor in the Institute of Chinese Medical Sciences at the University of Macau. He earned his BSc from Beijing Institute of Technology (2008–2012), his MPH in Epidemiology and Applied Biostatistics from Columbia University (2012–2014), and his DrPH in Epidemiology from Columbia University (2015–2021). He subsequently completed postdoctoral training as a Research Scientist at Columbia University (2021-22) and a Research Fellow jointly sponsored by the University of Michigan and Johns Hopkins University (2022-24). His research focuses on healthy aging, disaster epidemiology, pharmacoepidemiology, and meta-research. He currently serves as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Epidemiology and Global Health and is a member of the Editorial Board of BMC Medicine.

Email: peiyilu [at] hku.hk

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PEIYI LU

Prof. Lu is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Work and Social Administration, The University of Hong Kong. She is a gerontologist with expertise in social work, public health, and statistics. Her research interests broadly include gerontological social work, health disparity, social welfare policy related to aging, and quantitative methodology. She specializes in investigating the socioeconomic and cultural determinants of health in later life using cross-national and longitudinal survey data. She also has extensive experience in utilizing causal inference analysis to evaluate social welfare policies (e.g., elder abuse, anti-poverty, food insecurity) in China and the United States, with an ultimate goal of advancing social justice and health equity through policy advocacy. Her current research explores the intersection of housing and health in Hong Kong and beyond.

Prof. Lu has a MSW from Fu Jen Catholic University, Taiwan. She completed her PhD in Gerontology and MS in Statistics in 2021 from Iowa State University, USA. Before joining HKU, she was a postdoctoral fellow in social epidemiology at Columbia University, USA.

Lab Members

Alphabetical by Surname

NAME

Self-introduction: Please feel free to add your information wherever appropriate. We will organize and arrange everything alphabetically afterward.

Tianxin Cai

Tianxin Cai is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Social Work and Social Administration at The University of Hong Kong. Her research focuses on healthy aging and social welfare policy.

In the area of gerontechnology, she examines how smart aging technologies influence cognitive function and health in later life. She is also interested in the social determinants of health, exploring how socioeconomic and environmental factors shape health outcomes among aging populations. Building on this, she applies causal inference methods to evaluate the effects of social welfare policies on older adults' well-being. She is actively developing cross-national and longitudinal research to uncover aging patterns across diverse cultural and policy contexts.

Email: caitianxin@connect.hku.hk

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Simu Huang

Simu Huang is a Ph.D student at the Institute of Chinese Medical Sciences (ICMS), University of Macau. Her research focuses on the epidemiology of aging and public health.

Her work investigates how multidimensional determinants across the life course shape cognitive and physical aging. By examining a broad range of clinical, behavioral, and socioeconomic factors, she aims to uncover the underlying mechanisms that drive health disparities in later life. Methodologically, she applies advanced epidemiological approaches to cross-national and longitudinal datasets. Through this macro-level perspective, she evaluates aging patterns to inform population health strategies and promote healthy aging across a wide range of socio-cultural and policy backgrounds.

Email: simu.huang@connect.um.edu.mo

Github: https://github.com/simuh34

Yuqing Huang

As a Ph.D. student in Communication, I specialize in Human–AI Interaction, studying how people form relationships with AI — from NPCs in video games to AI companions. My research explores the frontier of social connection: what happens when artificial intelligence becomes a social actor rather than just a tool. My work asks what makes a connection feel real, when the other side of the relationship is artificial intelligence.

Before diving into academia, I worked behind the scenes in the tech industry, managing digital communities and creator ecosystems at platforms like Bilibili, NetEase and Tencent, across game user research and KOL marketing. I spent years observing users form profound emotional attachments to the digital worlds and virtual characters themselves.

Then generative AI arrived, and I noticed that the companions and influencers of the future might not be human at all. The emotional mechanisms I'd spent years observing — loyalty, attachment, parasocial intimacy — were about to find a new object.

That's what brought me here.

Email: yuqing.huang@connect.um.edu.mo

Athena Lam

Athena is a Research Assistant in the Department of Social Work and Social Administration at The University of Hong Kong. Her work focuses on the intersection of housing, health, and social equity in later life, particularly how different living environments shape older adults’ ageing experiences and inequalities.

Her research interests include gerontological social research, ageing and long-term care systems, social welfare policy, and life-and-death education. In her current role, she is involved in research projects on old-age poverty and residential environments in Hong Kong. Her fieldwork covers a wide range of housing settings, including subdivided units, public housing, the Home Ownership Scheme (HOS), private housing, and residential care facilities. She takes part in the full research process, including study design, participant recruitment, data collection, analysis, and academic writing.

Athena holds a BSSc in Gerontology from The Chinese University of Hong Kong and an MSocSc in Gerontology from HKU.

Email: Athena28@hku.hk

Qitong Liu

Qitong Liu is a Ph.D student at the Institute of Chinese Medical Sciences (ICMS), University of Macau. Her research focuses on cardiometabolic health, with an emphasis on cardiovascular diseases, metabolic disorders, and related chronic conditions in aging populations. Beyond these areas, she is also broadly interested in various chronic diseases that affect middle-aged and older adults.

Email: yc57584@um.edu.mo

Yuding Wei

Yuding Wei is a Master's student at the Institute of Chinese Medical Sciences (ICMS), University of Macau. Her research focuses on aging epidemiology and population health using harmonized longitudinal cohort data, including C-reactive protein trajectories linking physical activity and mortality, cross-national trends in functional disability (ADL/IADL), mixed-methods research on attacks on healthcare, immunosenescence, and Mendelian randomization in Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD).

Email: yuding.wei@connect.um.edu.mo

*Photo by Yu Zheng.

Yingchao Zeng

Yingchao Zeng is a Ph.D. student at the Institute of Chinese Medical Sciences (ICMS), University of Macau. Her research focuses on the epidemiology of aging and public health.

Her work investigates how social determinants in early life shape later-life health, while also exploring the underlying mechanisms. She is also interested in disaster epidemiology, particularly examining humanitarian issues in conflict-affected areas and identifying effective interventions.

Email: YC57536@um.edu.mo

Yu Zheng

Yu Zheng is a Master's student at the Insitute of Chinese Medical Sciences (ICMS), University of Macau. Her research centers on aging epidemiology and population health, leveraging harmonized longitudinal cohort data, including long-term physical activity trajectories, depressive symptoms, and incident dementia: a multi-cohort study across high-income countries and cross-national trends in urinary incontinence (UI).

Email: yuzheng.xy@connect.um.edu.mo

Jiaming Zhou

Jiaming Zhou is a Ph.D student in the Department of Communication at University of Macau. Her research focuses on social and individual psychological and behavioral implications of emerging information and communication technologies in digitally mediated environments, such as AI-mediated communication, digital gaming, and journalism industries.

Boshu Mao

Boshu Mao is an incoming Ph.D student

in the Department of Social Administration and Social Work at The University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on health disparity of disadvantaged older adults and its social and life course determinants. He is also interested in some demography topics, including migration, marriage and their association with health.

Email: maoboshu@126.com

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