Contact Information
3059 Lincoln Hall
Urbana, IL 61801
Office Hours
Photo credit: University of Illinois/Fred Zwicky
Biography
Ting-Syuan Lin is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research examines family life from a life-course perspective, focusing on the conditions that shape it and its connections to inequality. In her dissertation, she investigates how political divisions, geopolitical insecurity, and political violence shape family formation and fertility. Her broader research explores how employment and family trajectories, along with spatial contexts, relate to social and health inequalities. She draws on quantitative and computational methods, with particular expertise in sequence analysis.
She previously worked on the Taiwan Youth Project, a longitudinal study conducted by Academia Sinica, Taiwan’s national research academy. In 2025, she participated in the Population and Social Data Science Summer Incubator Program at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. She has received Taiwan’s Ministry of Education Government Scholarship to Study Abroad and the Taiwanese Overseas Pioneers Grants (TOP Grants) from the National Science and Technology Council. Her work has appeared in Social Indicators Research, Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, Population Research and Policy Review, Population, Space and Place, Research on Aging, and SSM – Population Health.
Research Interests
Marriage and Family; Demography; Life-Course Perspective; Spatial Inequality; Health Disparities, Quantitative Methods (with a focus on Sequence Analysis); Political Sociology; Public Policy
Education
M.A., Sociology, National Taiwan University, Taiwan
B.A., Sociology, National Taipei University, Taiwan (Minor in Economics)
Grants
2026 Taiwanese Overseas Pioneers Grants (TOP Grants), Doctoral Candidate, National Science and Technology Council, Taiwan
2026 Conference Presentation/Participation Grant, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
2025 Conference Presentation/Participation Grant, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
2025 Graduate Student Conference Travel Grant, Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies (CEAPS), University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
2024–2025 Government Scholarship to Study Abroad (GSSA), Ministry of Education, Taiwan
2023 Professional Development Program Grant, Graduate Student Employees Union, Stony Brook University
2023 Student Registration Grant, RC55 Social Indicators, International Sociological Association
2022 Conference Participation Grant, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Awards and Honors
2020 List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Courses Taught
Instructor of Record
SOC 202: Statistical Methods in Sociology
Guest Lecturer
SOC 225: Race and Ethnicity
SOC 273: Sociological Perspectives of the Family
SOC 274: Health, Illness, and Society
Workshop & Tutorial Instruction
Sequence Analysis for Demographers — Population Association of America (PAA) Pre-Conference Workshop, 2026 (Co-Instructor)
Introduction to Sequence Analysis in R — Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) Summer Incubator, 2025 (Instructor)
Recent Publications
*Corresponding authors
Liao, Tim F.*, and Ting-Syuan Lin. Forthcoming 2027. “Using Sequence Analysis in Social Science Research.” In Understanding Data Modelling and Data Analysis, edited by David Weakliem. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, Mass.: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Lai, Wen-Hua, Ting-Syuan Lin*, Tsai-Chin Cho, Helen C. S. Meier, Farah Ammous, and Amanda N. Leggett. 2026. “Employment Trajectories and Biological Aging: Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Work Instability and Epigenetic Age Acceleration.” SSM - Population Health 36:101973. doi:10.1016/j.ssmph.2026.101973.
Lin, Ting-Syuan*, Wen-Hua Lai, and Seung-won Emily Choi. 2026. “The Weight of Care: Examining the Relationship Between Grandchild Caregiving and Adiposity in Later Life.” Research on Aging 01640275261478949. doi:10.1177/01640275261478949.
Lin, Ting-Syuan*, and Yongjun Zhang. 2026. “Multidimensional Segregation Among Asian American Voters: Racial, Income, and Partisan Sorting in New York and California.” Population, Space and Place 32(4):e70271. https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.70271
－Media Coverage: Illinois News Bureau (October 19, 2026).
Ma, Zihui, Guangxiao Hu*, Ting-Syuan Lin, Lingyao Li, Songhua Hu, Loni Hagen, and Gregory B. Baecher. 2025. “Analyzing Public Response to Wildfires: A Socio-Spatial Study Using SIR Models and NLP Techniques.” Computers, Environment and Urban Systems 121:102333. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2025.102333
Lin, Ting-Syuan*. 2025. “Regional Difference in Changing Son Preference Attitudes in Taiwan: An Age–Period–Cohort-Interaction Analysis, 2001–2021.” Population Research and Policy Review 44(3):28. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-025-09953-3
Tsai, Ming-Chang, and Ting-Syuan Lin*. 2025. “Precarious Work During the Transition to Adulthood: A Latent Profile Analysis of Taiwan’s Young People.” Social Indicators Research 176(3):993–1020. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-024-03495-5
Professional Service
- 2025–Present Editorial Associate, Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World
- 2023–Present Listserv Manager, Asia & Asian America Section, American Sociological Association