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Shuyi Qiu’s research is grounded in the idea that inequalities in adulthood can be traced back to earlier stages of life, shaped jointly by macro, meso and micro contexts, including family resources, neighborhood conditions and the policy environments people grow up in. Qiu, a student in Duke’s joint Public Policy and Sociology PhD program, is examining how macro-level social and policy contexts shape human development across the life course. In this Q&A, Qiu discusses what drew her to Sanford, how her interdisciplinary lens shapes her research, and how she hopes her work will inform both scholarship and policy.
Five Questions with Shuyi
Why did you choose Sanford's PhD program?
At first, I came to Sanford for its Master of Public Policy (MPP) program. In my very first semester, I had the chance to work as a research assistant at Duke Center for Child and Family Policy (CCFP) with Professors Christina Gibson-Davis, Lisa Gennetian, and Lisa Keister. They are mentors I have continued working with throughout my PhD and now are on my PhD dissertation committee. We collaborated on a project examining the duration and timing of net worth poverty and children’s educational attainment (the paper has been formally accepted at Demography and is forthcoming this year!). That research assistantship opened my eyes to what social science research looks like in practice. I learned the full workflow of quantitative research using longitudinal data, from sample selection and data cleaning to model testing and interpretation. What I loved most was tracing people’s life trajectories over time and trying to make sense of the social patterns behind them: why some families are able to build economic stability while others face persistent, and sometimes intergenerational, constraints. That experience confirmed my interest in inequality and mobility research, so I applied to the PhD program in my second year. Sanford’s joint PhD in Public Policy and Sociology was the best fit because my research interest sits at the intersection of demography, sociology, and public policy. Sanford’s interdisciplinary community, especially through the Duke Population Research Institute (DUPRI), made it the ideal place to develop this kind of scholarship.
Why are you pursuing a PhD in public policy and sociology?
I’m pursuing a PhD in public policy and sociology because I want to do research that connects theory to real-world problems. Sociology training helps me understand how inequality is produced and reproduced: what social mechanisms, institutions, and life-course processes generate the patterns we observe. Public policy pushes me to take the next step to ask how those patterns can be changed, and to rigorously evaluate whether specific interventions can reduce inequality and improve social mobility in practice. Beyond explaining why problems exist, I also want to test what works, for whom, and under what conditions, and to translate evidence into insights that are useful beyond academic publications. The training from the joint PhD program gives me the toolkit to connect theory, mechanisms, and policy evaluation in one coherent research agenda. It also makes it easier for me to seek mentorship across fields. My wonderful dissertation committee, for example, includes scholars with expertise in sociology, public policy, demography, and economics, which has helped me examine questions through different disciplinary lenses and develop research that speaks to multiple audiences.
What are your current research interests?
I am broadly interested in social inequality and mobility, with a particular focus on analyzing them from a life-course and socio-ecological perspective. My research is grounded in the idea that inequalities we observe in adulthood can often be traced back to earlier stages of life, shaped by family resources, neighborhood opportunity structures, and the policy environments people grow up in. These layers of context jointly shape developmental pathways and help explain why advantages accumulate for some families while constraints persist for others, sometimes across generations. My dissertation includes three such projects that examine how macro-level social and policy contexts shape human development across the life course. My broader goal is to contribute to our understanding of how structural contexts shape inequality and identify policy pathways that can support more equitable outcomes across the life span.
What are the potential impacts of your research?
I think the most ambitious goal for any policy scholar is that our research can eventually contribute to real-world change. At the same time, I recognize that the pathway from academic evidence to policy change often takes time, and is sometimes constrained by timing, politics, and implementation capacity. On the academic side, I, of course, hope my work can help policymakers think about what kinds of interventions work, for whom, and when in the life course they matter most. Outcomes that look “individual” are often jointly shaped by people’s material conditions and the broader social environments they grow up in, so effective interventions need to address those structural constraints rather than placing the burden solely on individuals. On the public side, I also hope to communicate these ideas beyond professional policy audiences. A core message of my work is that outcomes are shaped not only by individual effort, but also by the environments that encourage, support, and reward that effort (and these are often beyond individual’s control). If my research helps broader audiences better recognize structural constraints and respond with more understanding and empathy toward people in difficult circumstances, that would be a meaningful impact to me as well.
What are your post-Duke PhD career aspirations?
After completing my PhD, I plan to seek a faculty position in academia, especially in interdisciplinary departments such as policy schools where I can bridge sociology and public policy. I am excited to build a research agenda that examines how macro, meso, and micro contexts interact to produce inequality and shape social mobility across generations, and how policy can promote more equitable outcomes across the life span. But I am equally excited about teaching. Beyond training the next generation of researchers, I also hope to help students across different backgrounds develop the ability to evaluate evidence and think critically about social problems, skills that I feel especially important in an era of information overload, where it is increasingly difficult to distinguish rigorous evidence from noise.