I am a Chair Professor in the Division of Social Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). I am also a Distinguished Professor (特聘教授) in the School of History and Culture at Central China Normal University.

My research focuses on demography, stratification and inequality in historical China and in comparative perspective. As a member of the Lee-Campbell group, I study official, educational, and professional elites in China from the middle of the 18th century to the present. For this, we have a family of ‘big data’ studies of specific categories of elites using datasets we have constructed ourselves from archival sources. In connection with this, I lead the study of the Qing civil service from the middle of the 18th century to the beginning of the 20th century by construction and analysis of a database of office holders we call the China Government Employee Database-Qing (CGED-Q). In addition to employing traditional quantitative approaches from the social sciences we collaborate with historians and computer scientists. I am involved in two other major projects with the Lee-Campbell Group that involve the creation and analysis of large, longitudinal, individual-level databases from archival records: a study of the social origins and careers of university students, professionals, and other elites in the first half of the twentieth century and a study of rural society in mainland China from 1949 to the mid-1960s using village-level microdata.

I continue research on kinship, inequality, and demographic behavior in historical China and in comparative perspective using large multi-generational population databases that my collaborators and I constructed, most notably the China Multigenerational Panel Datasets (CMGPD). I published on a wide variety of topics using these data, including economic, family and social influences on demographic outcomes such as birth, marriage, migration, and death, fertility limitation in historical China, and the role of kin networks in shaping social mobility. We also published related books at MIT Press and Cambridge University Press. We publicly released the CMGPD and they are are available at ICPSR. 

I was a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford 2022-23. I was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004. I was a Changjiang Scholar (長江學者講座教授) at Central China Normal University from 2017 to 2020.

I received my Bachelor’s degree at Caltech. I graduated with honors in June 1989 with a double major in Engineering and Applied Science and in History. I received my PhD in Sociology and Demography at the University of Pennsylvania in 1995. While in graduate school, I studied Chinese for six months at the Mandarin Training Centre at National Taiwan Normal University, six months at the Chinese Language Center (汉语中心) at Peking University, and a year at the Inter-university Program in Chinese Language Studies at National Taiwan University. From January 1995 to June 1996, I was an NICHD Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan Population Studies Center. I taught at UCLA Department of Sociology from 1996 to 2013, reaching the rank of full Professor. In 2013, I moved to the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, where in 2020 I was awarded the title of Chair Professor.

In my spare time, I take pictures. I like to photograph cities at night and have a large collection of photos of Hong Kong at night. Lately I have been taking lots of pictures of birds. To see all of my featured collections by location and theme, please visit my photography website. You can also follow me on Instagram.