225 Wallace Hall
Princeton, NJ 08540
Welcome! My name is Luyin Zhang—I am a social and biological demographer and a PhD candidate in Population Studies at Princeton University.
My work begins from a simple premise: many common social science measures aggregate meaningful variation. For instance, racial categories group together people with very different experiences of racialization, and life expectancy compresses mortality across ages and causes of death into a single number. I develop and apply genomic, computational, and formal demographic tools that recover this hidden variation—variation that, when socially patterned, leads standard measures to understate inequality, and that sometimes provides exogeneity for causal inference.
Substantively, I study health, inequality, and family dynamics: racial stratification and skin tone, assortative mating, how children shape their parents’ health and survival, and why mortality improvements stall or reverse across countries. My work draws on survey, biomedical, and administrative data and involves computational pipelines that scale to millions of variables per observation on high-performance and cloud-computing infrastructure. My research has appeared or is forthcoming in Demography, Nature Human Behaviour, Sociological Science, and the International Journal of Epidemiology.
When I’m not working, I alternate between staying in and going everywhere. I enjoy horse riding, dancing, and traveling to places where I don’t speak the language but somehow manage anyway.