This is a summary of my training and career, starting from my time as an undergraduate. Please go here for a description of my current research.
I received my BS in History and Engineering & Applied Science from Caltech in 1989 and my MA and PhD in Sociology and Demography from the University of Pennsylvania in 1995. After an NIH postdoc at the University of Michigan Population Studies Center, in July 1996 I started as an assistant professor at the Department of Sociology at UCLA. I moved to HKUST in 2013.
Undergraduate
I started out at Caltech planning to double-major in Electrical Engineering and History, the latter with an emphasis on China, but over time my emphasis shifted from engineering to China. I have a separate page where I discuss the origins of my interest in conducting research on China, and summarize my experiences there. I have also written an extended reflection about my time at Caltech.
In my sophomore year at Caltech, I began working as a research assistant for James Lee, who at the time was an Assistant Professor of History at Caltech. This was the beginning of a collaboration on the study of inequality, family organization, and demographic behavior in historical China that continues to this day. At the time, James needed someone with expertise in database programming to help manage the Daoyi household register data he was collecting for what became the basis of our book Fate and Fortune. This was an exciting opportunity for me because it allowed me to apply expertise I had developed in high school to work related to what at the time was a hobby interest, China. My first trip to China came at the end of my sophomore year in summer 1987, when I joined James on a research trip to Beijing and Shenyang. In Beijing, we stayed at Peking University and carried out research in the No. 1 Historical Archives. In Shenyang, we stayed at Liaoning University, and visited the Provincial Archives as well as Daoyi.
By my senior year, I decided to pursue a PhD in demography and sociology and eventually an academic career focused on the study of China. In consultation with James Lee and others, I had decided that demography, and quantitative sociology more generally, offered the best opportunity to combine my technical training and expertise and training with my interest in China.
In between Caltech and Penn, I spent a year in Taiwan and the mainland supported by a Watson Fellowship and a Durfee Foundation Travel Grant.
Graduate School
For my PhD dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania, I reconstructed mortality trends in Beijing from the 17th century to the present by combining data from multiple historical and contemporary sources. I showed that death rates in Beijing fell dramatically in the early part of the 20th century because of basic improvements in public health, well before the better known nationwide mortality decline that took place after 1949.
I spent the 1992-1993 academic year at what was then the Inter-university Program in Chinese Language Studies (aka Stanford Center) which was located on the campus of National Taiwan University. I spent the summer of 1993 in Beijing collecting materials for my PhD dissertation. For 1992-1993 I was supported by a Social Science Research Council International Pre-doctoral Fellowship.
While still a graduate student, I became involved in what would become the Eurasia Project. The first meeting I attended was in Kyoto in 1994. The Eurasia Project is an international and interdisciplinary collaboration that seeks to examine relationships between economic and community context, household organization, and individual demographic behavior in Europe and Asia through comparative analysis of population databases constructed from 18th and 19th century Belgium, Italy, Sweden, Japan and China. We produced three comparative volumes, Life Under Pressure, Prudence and Pressure, and Similarity in Difference. The first focuses on economic conditions, household organization, and mortality. The second focuses on fertility. The third volume, devoted to a comparative study of marriage, was published by MIT Press in 2014.
UCLA
I joined the UCLA Department of Sociology in 1996 as an assistant professor. I was promoted to associate professor in 2002 and full professor in 2005. I served as Vice-Chair and Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Sociology from 2002 to 2005. I spent a sabbatical from 2005 to 2006 at the Population Studies Center of the University of Michigan. For part of that year I was supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship that was awarded to me in 2004. I also served on the College Faculty Executive Committee between 2011 and 2013.
For our studies of inequality, family, and demographic organization in northeast China, James Lee and I constructed databases from eighteenth and nineteenth century population registers, the China Multigenerational Panel Datasets (CMGPD). James Lee had begun construction of the database in the 1980s but it was only in the 1990s that we began the massive expansion that created the CMGPD as we now know it.
We publicly released the first of these databases, the CMGPD-Liaoning, at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) with support from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) with funds from R01 HD057175-01A1 (Lee/Leonard PI). This database comprises 1.5 million observations of more than 250,000 people in several hundred Liaoning villages from 1749 to 1909. A key feature of these data is that through automated record linkage of kin, we have been able to sort the individuals in the database into approximately 1000 distinct descent groups defined by common descent from a founder, allowing for the use of the descent group as a unit of analysis.
We also released a database we constructed for Shuangcheng county in Heilongjiang province in northeast China, the CMGPD-Shuangcheng. This released was supported by NICHD 1R01HD070985-01 (Campbell PI), and was done in collaboration with Shuang Chen at the University of Iowa. The population is very different from the one in Liaoning. It consists of settlers who arrived in the area earlier in the nineteenth century along with their descendants. The registers cover the population annually from 1865 to 1911. Distinguishing features of the dataset include the availability of linked landholding registers, and a much richer set of variables describing social status. Our collaborator Shuang Chen’s book State-Sponsored Inequality (from Stanford University Press) uses the data to study inequality in the area in the late 19th century.
In connection with our work on the CMGPD, I was active in efforts to promote the use of household register data from various settings in East Asia to carry out comparative studies within that region. One key focus has been to promote connections among researchers working with East Asian historical household register data. Towards this end, I convened meetings at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in September 2010 and at UCLA in August 2011 to bring together scholars working with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean data. These received support from the UC Pacific Rim Research Program. At these meetings, researchers introduced their data, presented papers, and we developed plans for coordination for future research on topics such as migration and stratification.
I was a faculty affiliate of the UCLA California Center for Population Research (CCPR) since its founding, and served as Associate Director for Training at CCPR from 2006 to 2011. As Associate Director, I was Program Director for the NICHD supported T32 training program in population sciences and demography. From 2009 to 2013, I served as Training Director for an NIGMS supported training program (NIGMS 1T32GM084903-01A1) that Professor Julie Bower in Health Psychology and I established with support from many colleagues in CCPR and Psychology. This program trained behavioral and population science students to conduct research at the interface of the behavioral, biomedical, and population sciences.
HKUST
In 2013, I moved to the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. I am now a Chair Professor in the Division of Social Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
My primary focus since arriving at HKUST has been a new project to use ‘big data’ based on the Jinshenlu (缙绅录) and other sources for the quantitative study of Qing officialdom. In summer 2013, after my arrival at HKUST, I learned from Professor Yuxue Ren at Shanghai Jiaotong University about the Jinshenlu, which she was using in a study of officials who served in northeast China. The Jinshenlu were rosters of government offices and their holders that were published on a quarterly basis during the Qing. Transcribed into a database and linked longitudinally, they provide career histories for officials. Professor Ren, James Lee and I developed a plan to create the China Government Employee Database-Qing (CGED-Q) by transcription of available editions of the 缙绅录 and I applied to the General Research Fund of the Hong Kong Research Grants Council for support. Our application was successful. With the help of the same team of coders who worked with us to construct the CMGPD, we began work. As of January 2019, the CGED-Q now contains nearly 4 million records.
I have also contributed to other Lee-Campbell Group studies, including the ongoing study of educational elites and professionals during the Republican era, and a study of rural society in mid-20th century China by analysis of household registration forms. I have a more detailed discussion of my role in these projects elsewhere on this site.
Since 2023, I have been a Co-PI on the RGC Areas of Excellence Project “Quantitative History of China” (Zhiwu Chen PI).
At HKUST I have served in a variety of administrative and service roles. For five years starting in 2013 I was Associate Dean in the School of Humanities and Social Science. For my first year I was Associate Dean for Research, and then the following year, after the retirement of the Associate Dean for Postgraduate Studies, I inherited that portfolio. I stepped down as Associate Dean in June 2018, and then served as Acting Head of the Division of Social Science from July 2018 to June 2019. From January 2022 to August 2022 and then again from July 2023 to December 2023, I was Associate Dean for Research.
I was also founding program director of the HKUST Division of Social Science’s new undergraduate major Quantitative Social Analysis, which had its first intake in fall 2017. In this capacity, I oversaw the development of the curriculum, recruitment and admissions, and student matters. The program provides undergraduates with a training that integrates traditional social science theory and evidence with a rigorous training in quantitative methods. I stepped down in July 2021.
At the university level, I was a member of our University Appointment and Substantiation Committee for one year and then chaired it for two years, during which time colleagues and I worked with the Provost and others to change procedures to increase and standardize the information in the dossiers. I served on university search committees for the Vice-Provost for Research and Graduate Studies and the President, and served on the university Honorary Awards Committee. I have served on a variety of other university level committees, including the Committee on Postgraduate Studies, the Student Discipline Committee, and the Committee on Research Infrastructure.
My teaching focuses on graduate courses in statistics and social demography, and undergraduate courses in Chinese society and social demography. I also have courses at Coursera on Social Science Approaches to the Study of China.