I am a social scientist whose work examines a central question: how do population dynamics shape life chances and social inequalities in rapidly changing societies? With a strong foundation in sociology and advanced training in demography and ecology, I study aging, family, and health through a sociological lens enriched by rigorous demographic and statistical methods. 

Currently, I am a Research Scientist in the Research Group of Kinship Inequalities and in the Department of Digital and Computational Demography at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR). Before that, I was a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Demography at the University of California, Berkeley, working on the CenSoc database in the group of Joshua Goldstein. I hold a B.A. and M.A. in the Department of Sociology from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, and a Ph.D. from the Tuljapurkar Lab at Stanford University, specializing in demography and ecology. This path across sociology, demography, and ecology shaped my interdisciplinary approach to studying aging, family, and inequality.

Specifically, my research explores how fertility decline, rising longevity, and educational expansion transform family and kinship networks, with implications for caregiving, bereavement, and intergenerational support. I have developed new frameworks, such as the Kin Dependency Ratio (KDR) and Lifetime Kin Overlap (LKO), to reveal hidden inequalities in who has access to family resources and for how long. Beyond kinship, I also study how variability in lifespan affects retirement decisions and social security systems, and how reproductive strategies influence population resilience across different animal and plant species. Together, my projects advance understanding of how populations adapt to demographic and environmental challenges, offering new frameworks to inform research and policy in a rapidly changing world.