Biography and Research Interests
Education
Ph.D. in Sociology
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Interdisciplinary Scholar in Social Sciences and Public Health.
Dr. Chen specializes in conducting multidisciplinary research to understand social, environmental, behavioral, and biological linkages in developmental and health trajectories from adolescence into adulthood. She has been involved in the social sciences, epidemiology, demography and medicine, working on research projects bridging social and biomedical sciences to advance knowledge on the development of health disparities across the life course.
She is interested in taking an integrative approach to study the social, behavioral, and biological linkages in mental health development throughout the life course.
She is an applied advanced mythologist with proficient skills in advanced statistical modelling of longitudinal and multilevel data.
She is also an advanced survey methodologist who has been involved in survey questionnaire design and data collection for national & longitudinal studies, and specializes in complex survey data analysis with weights, and weight construction.
She is a scholar of social stratification and immigration studies striving to understand the assimilation processes and well-being of immigrants and their descendants of first, second, third-plus generations and diverse racial/ethnic backgrounds.
In her spare time, she enjoys reading, music, dry flower crafts, and prose writing.
Primary Research Interests and Expertise:
- Social, Behavioral, Biological Linkages of Mental Health across the Life Course
- Social and Behavioral Linkages in Health
- Health Disparities and Social Inequality
- Life Course Human Development Study
- Well-Being of Immigrants, Immigrant Descendants and Racial/Ethnic Minorities
- Applied Statistics of Longitudinal and Multilevel Models
- Complex Survey Methodology and Weighting