Yiang Li is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Chicago. He is also a Predoctoral Trainee in the NIA T32 Program in the Demography and Economics of Aging at the Center on Healthy Aging Behaviors and Longitudinal Investigations (CHABLIS) and a graduate student affiliate at the Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility at the University of Chicago.

Yiang is a sociologist of health and a social demographer. His research asks how socioeconomic disparities in health and mortality are produced over the life course, with particular attention to when and for whom exposure to concentrated poverty and changes in family structure shape health from childhood into later life. He traces the mechanisms through which health advantages and disadvantages spill over within households, between siblings and partners, and are transmitted from parents to offspring. In related work, he studies how contemporary and historical population processes shape morbidity and mortality across cohorts and countries.

Methodologically, Yiang works at the intersection of causal inference, demography, and computational social science. He develops causal inference methods for time-varying exposures and effect heterogeneity, integrating them with demographic techniques for analyzing age, duration, and cohort. He builds and analyzes large-scale longitudinal and administrative data using machine learning, record linkage, and high-performance computing. He completed a doctoral certificate in Advanced Quantitative Methods.

Yiang holds an MA in Computational Social Science from the University of Chicago and a BSc in Social Sciences with Quantitative Methods from University College London (UCL).

His research work has been published in Social Forces, Social Science Research, Social Science & Medicine, and Demographic Research, among other peer-reviewed journals. He also serves as an Assistant Editor of the American Journal of Sociology.

Yiang can be reached via email: yiangli@uchicago.edu and his CV can be found here.