Kristin Liao

Sociologist, Social Demographer

Research interest:

Stratification & mobility, occupation, AI and work
Immigration, immigrants' economic integration
Demography, racial/ethnic inequality
Quantitative methodology

Welcome to my website! I am a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where I am concurrently pursuing a Master's degree in Statistics and Data Science. I was selected as a NICHD T32 Predoctoral Trainee at the California Center for Population Research (CCPR) from 2023 to 2026. I affiliate with and help coordinate the Inequality Data Science Lab (IDS-Lab), led by Jennie Brand and Ian Lundberg, and the Occupation Lab, led by Xi Song and Jennie Brand.

I study how immigration and technological change reshape occupational structure and economic inequality in the contemporary U.S. labor market. One line of my research examines the temporal changes in immigrants' economic integration, such as occupational segregation and wage inequality, and how these changing patterns reflect broader shifts in labor market stratification in the United States. A second line of my work examines how AI-driven technological change and the broader occupational restructuring have transformed intra- and inter-generational mobility trajectories. Across both agendas, I use statistical and computational methods applied to large-scale observational data.

My research has been funded by the NIH's Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the Donald J. Treiman Research Fellowship, and the Pearl Wang Fellowship. My work has received the RC28 Travel Award and an honorable mention from the Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship. In addition, I have won awards at UCLA for excellence in teaching, mentoring undergraduate honors theses, and department service.

Feel free to contact me at ktliao[at]ucla.edu.

News

October 2026: I will serve as the Fall/Winter Fellowship Coordinator at the UCLA Department of Sociology, providing guidance and mentorship for fellowship applications to all sociology graduate students.
August 2026: I will present my lead-author paper on new occupations at the RC28 and ASA conferences. In addition, two of my co-authored papers, one on the quantitative methodology of descriptive research and one on educational selectivity and immigrant health advantage, will also be on the ASA program.
June 2026: I organized the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science at UCLA from June 8 to 12 as the lead student organizer. I also served as a speaker and gave a coding workshop on causal estimators for effect heterogeneity.
May 2026: At PAA, I presented my lead-author paper on new occupations and intergenerational mobility and my sole-authored dissertation chapter on the changing immigrant-native earnings disparity over time. Two other papers on which I am a coauthor also appeared on the program.
March 2026: I presented my sole-authored dissertation chapter on AI exposure and occupational mobility at the AI and Social Inequality Conference, UC Davis.
January 2026: I received the NICHD T32 predoctoral traineeship from January to March, as part of my second-cycle traineeship funding awarded in AY 2024-25.

Past News

August 2025: I served on the program committee of RC28 Summer Meeting 2025 at UCLA and chaired a session on immigrant assimilation and economic inequality.
June 2025: I received the 2025 Donald J. Treiman Fellowship from CCPR.
May 2025: I received the C.Phil. degree in Sociology as a PhD candidate.
April 2025: I presented a first-authored dissertation chapter on occupational segregation by nativity at PAA.
January 2025: I received the NICHD T32 predoctoral traineeship from January to September, as part of my second-cycle traineeship funding awarded in AY 2024-25.

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