Ting-Syuan Lin

Ting-Syuan Lin is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Previously a research assistant for the Taiwan Youth Project,  she was awarded the prestigious Overseas Study Scholarship from Taiwan’s Ministry of Education. In 2025, she participated in the Population and Social Data Science Summer Incubator Program at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research.

Working at the intersection of family sociology and political demography, her research applies a life-course perspective to examine how political ideology and polarization, institutional arrangements, and spatial inequality shape the cultural toolkits people draw on—and, in turn, family and demographic behaviors. She links these contexts to fertility attitudes and outcomes, including son preference, fertility, and family-formation pathways, across East Asia and the United States. She uses quantitative, spatial, and sequence methods, including applications of sequence analysis to both family-formation and health/aging trajectories; her methodological work is featured in a forthcoming handbook chapter on sequence analysis. Her published and ongoing work also examines youth precarity during the transition to adulthood, ethnoracial intermarriage, and partisan sorting as dimensions of spatial inequality. She has published in journals including Population Research and Policy Review, Social Indicators Research, and Computers, Environment and Urban Systems.