Research interest
Immigration, immigrants' economic integration
Stratification & mobility, occupation, AI and work
Demography, racial/ethnic inequality
Email: ktliao[at]ucla.edu
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.Â
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.
You can view my CV here.