Biography

I am currently pursuing a Ph.D. in sociology at UCLA and am affiliated with the California Center for Population Research. My training includes experience with causal inference, experimental methods, introductory machine learning, and comparative-historical analysis.

Prior to enrolling in the sociology program at UCLA, I worked as a research assistant at Academia Sinica in Taiwan. My primary responsibility was to create panel data for firms and examine the impact of different expansion strategies on the performance of Taiwanese companies such as TSMC and Foxconn.

Dissertation Project

My research centers on organizational processes and social inequality. In my current project, I am using multilevel and longitudinal data from 17 countries and over one million households from 1995 to 2019 to examine the relationship between increasing concentration in top commercial banks and household indebtedness. I am also studying the impact of the diversification of banking institutions and legislation of alternative financial services on household borrowing in the United States.

Teaching

In addition to my research, I am an award-winning teaching assistant for undergraduate discussion sessions in research methods. Each year, I lead more than 12 teams of 60+ undergraduate students in conducting one survey project and one vignette experiment.

In 2022, I served as the instructor for “Introduction to Sociological Research Methods,” where I taught 40 students about various methods in social science research (such as surveys, experiments, and interviews), measurement techniques (including conceptualization and operationalization), sampling strategies, and evaluation tools (such as reliability and validity). The student evaluation for this course was 8.6 out of 9.