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. She previously worked as a research assistant on the Taiwan Youth Project, an Academia Sinica longitudinal survey, contributing to survey implementation and data collection. She received Taiwan’s Ministry of Education Government Scholarship to Study Abroad and the Taiwanese Overseas Pioneers (TOP) Grant from the National Science and Technology Council. In 2025, she participated in the Population and Social Data Science Summer Incubator Program at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research.
She is a quantitative sociologist and demographer whose research bridges political demography, family sociology, and life-course inequality. Her work examines how political divisions and geopolitical insecurity shape marriage, fertility, migration, and partner selection. Her dissertation, "Politics, Security, and Demographic Change: How Political Instability and Ideology Shape Family Formation," investigates partisan differences in U.S. family trajectories, perceived cross-Strait threat and son preference in Taiwan, and the role of state capacity in fertility responses to political violence. Her broader research explores how employment and family trajectories, caregiving, and social and spatial contexts relate to social mobility and health inequalities across the life course.
She uses quantitative and computational methods, with particular expertise in sequence analysis. 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/Population Studies; Life-Course Perspective; Spatial Inequality; Quantitative Methods (with a focus on Sequence Analysis); Political Sociology; Public Policy
Education
M.A. in Sociology, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan
B.A. in Sociology (minor in Economics), National Taipei University, Taipei, Taiwan
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
SOC 202: Statistical Methods in Sociology — Instructor of Record
SOC 225: Race and Ethnicity — Guest Lecturer
SOC 273: Sociological Perspectives of the Family — Guest Lecturer
SOC 274: Health, Illness, and Society — Guest Lecturer
Workshops & Tutorials
Sequence Analysis for Demographers — PAA Pre-Conference Workshop
Introduction to Sequence Analysis in R — MPIDR Summer Incubator Tutorial
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
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