
PhD Student
she/her
Leping Wang is a demographer and medical sociologist interested in the research of aging and life course, health, social networks, and inequality. Her lines of research involve how resources including social, cultural and human capital shape different outcomes of wellbeing including mental and cognitive health, educational attainment, labor market mobility, and economic precarity among individuals and social groups, and how these processes manifest inequality through the mechanisms of cumulative (dis)advantages and intersectional identities.
Leping’s current dissertation work explores how different types of social connectedness (informal versus formal participation), and social capital (bonding versus bridging social capital) shape the mental and cognitive health outcomes among older adults across the United States and China. Her master’s thesis examined the relationship between four human capital factors including formal education, professional training, professional certificates and the knowledge of foreign languages, and the likelihood of upward occupational mobility among rural migrant workers in the urban labor market in China, and showed from a life course perspective the heterogeneous marginal effects for different human capital factors, which are dependent on the level to which that specific human capital factor fills in the gap in job qualifications between the origin and destination occupations.
Leping received her M.A. degree in Applied Quantitative Research at New York University and her LL.B. degree in Sociology at Xiamen University.