I am a social demographer studying how population change shapes aging, health, family life, and inequality. My work starts from a broad question: when fertility declines and lives become longer, how do people and societies organize support, and who becomes more vulnerable? I examine this question using formal demographic models, statistical approaches, and large-scale data.

I am currently an Assistant Professor in the Division of Social Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. I received my B.A. and M.A. in Sociology from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, and my Ph.D. from the Tuljapurkar Lab at Stanford University, where I was trained in demography, ecology, and mathematical modeling. This path across sociology, demography, and ecology shaped my interdisciplinary approach to studying aging, family, and inequality.

Before joining HKUST, I was a Research Scientist in the Research Group of Kinship Inequalities and the Department of Digital and Computational Demography at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. Before that, I was a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Demography at the University of California, Berkeley with Joshua Goldstein.

A central part of my work examines kinship and social networks as systems of support. I study how changes in fertility and mortality reshape the availability of children, parents, siblings, and extended kin, and what these changes mean for care, financial support, and social inequality. Related papers have appeared in Demographic Research and Demography, with recent MPIDR working papers on kin dependency and how human capital mitigate caregiving challenges.

I also study aging, health, and mortality inequality. My work examines long-run gains in human survival, lifespan uncertainty, retirement and social security, and exposure to bereavement under changing mortality conditions. For example, in a paper published in PNAS, my coauthors and I showed that longevity has continued to increase despite claims of a fixed upper limit. 

Looking ahead, I am interested in support systems beyond the family. As kin networks become smaller and more geographically dispersed, aging societies increasingly rely on friends, communities, institutions, and digital tools to sustain well-being. My ongoing work studies how kin and non-kin networks shape health trajectories in later life. Future projects will examine how emerging technologies, including digital communication, health monitoring, care coordination tools, and artificial intelligence, may create new forms of support while also reinforcing inequalities through unequal access and digital divides.