Lead Researcher, Co-Principal Investigator

Vivian Shaw is the Mellon Assistant Professor in Asian American Studies at Vanderbilt University. She earned her PhD in Sociology from the University of Texas at Austin. She teaches on Asian American culture and society, environmental inequality, social movements, and qualitative methods. She is completing a book about how the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster laid the political groundwork for the emergence of anti-discrimination social movement networks. Vivian’s work has appeared in Critical Asian Studies and Radical History Review and other publications. You can learn more about her work at her website.

Co-Principal Investigator

Jason Beckfield is Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. His research investigates the institutional causes and consequences of social inequality. Currently, he is working on three projects: (1) a book about economic inequality in the European Union; (2) a monograph and a series of journal articles that develop an institutional theory of stratification, with a substantive focus on population health; and (3) collaborative publications, many co-authored with PhD students, that investigate long-term trends in the development of political economy.  See his Open Scholar page for articles, working papers, and CV.

Shun Ahmed (she/ella) got her undergraduate degree in Engineering Science from Vanderbilt University, focusing on the intersection between technology/data and social sciences. Currently, she works as a Data, Learning, and Impact Manager at Conexion Americas, a nonprofit organization focusing on building a welcoming community and creating opportunities where Latino families can belong, contribute and succeed. Her current project for ACP resides in navigating the hidden narrative of Asians in the South through both documenting their stories and puzzle-piecing their history.

Sua Kim is PhD student in the department of City & Metropolitan Planning at University of Utah. Her study focuses on how to improve community-level economic resilience in the face of disasters. To this end, she has been conducting survey and interview studies of post-disaster recovery experiences of small businesses in the context of COVID-19 and other disasters, especially minority-owned businesses which place higher emphasis on sociocultural resources and have different (both positive and negative) recovery trajectories than other businesses.

Dr. Rachel Kuo writes, teaches, and researches on race, social movements, and digital technology. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Media and Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Previously, she was a 2020-22 Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and 2021-22 Visiting Scholar at Duke University’s Asian American and Diasporic Studies program. She is also a current Fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology and 2021-22 Siegel Endowment Research Fellow. She has a PhD and MA in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University. She works closely with community partners in developing her research, and her longer-term research goals and questions center and engage emergent questions and practices from grassroots social movements. She is a founding member and current affiliate of the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies and also a co-founder of the Asian American Feminist Collective, where she is co-editing the anthology Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities (under contract, Haymarket Books.

Jackie Leung is the Executive Director and a Public Health Advocate with the Micronesian Islander Community (MIC). Jackie’s responsibilities include community engagement, outreach, and education including COVID-19 wrap around services, developing job training opportunities including healthcare interpreters and community health workers, and working in partnership with an academic nurse at Washington State University focusing on early childhood learning and development. She serves on multiple commissions and organizations including the Oregon Commission on Asian and Pacific Islander Affairs, the Asian & Pacific Islander Caucus for Public Health, and is a City Councilor. Jackie is a graduate student at Oregon State University majoring in Public Health – Global Health. In her free time, Jackie enjoys spending time with her family.

Angela is a Communication Studies graduate student at Cal State LA. Her research interests include various topics that range from working class movements, to agitational communication and racial justice. 

Aside from her work in academia, she is a self-taught textile artist who spends her free time tufting rugs and collecting art from fellow Angelenos, much like herself. 

Catherine H. Nguyen is an Assistant Professor in Asian Diasporic Literatures at Emerson College. She earned her PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles, and was previously an ACLS Fellow and Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard Postdoctoral Fellow. Her book project Children Born of War, Adoptees Made by War explores how the mixed-race child and the transnational adoptee as subjects complicate the categories of refugee and adoptee and simultaneously undermine the expected gratitude with acts of hostility. Her work on Asian American literature and the Vietnamese diaspora has appeared in Adoption & Culture and edited volumes.

Project Manager, Qualitative Committee Lead

christina ong is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh studying the development of Asian America in the 1960s-1980s through an in-depth case study of New York City’s Basement Workshop. Her research interests span topics related to diaspora, racial justice, and transnational feminisms.

In her spare time, christina writes screenplays and produces audio stories, mostly through her podcast, Seats at the Table, elevating the perspectives of activist and immigrant women. You can learn more about her work and writing by visiting her website.

Policy Liaison

Susanna Y Park is a post-doctoral fellow at the National Mental Health Innovation Center at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. She has a PhD in Public Health from Oregon State University and a MA in International Development with a focus on Global Health Affairs. Her research includes areas of health policy, community-based research, and health equity. Susanna enjoys reading, cuddling with her dog Korra, and being a plant-mom.

You can find out more about her involvements on her website.

Nat Tahir is a graduate student at George Washington University's Milken Institute School of Public Health studying Community-Oriented Primary Care. She is interested in disaggregating health data and understanding how geography, immigration, socioeconomic context, and social identity work together to uniquely impact the health of Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and other Pacific Islanders––the fastest growing ethnic demographic in the US. Nat is also passionate about pan-ethnic movement building, having co-founded Georgetown University's first Asian American and Pacific Islander student advocacy group which subsequently introduced the university's first Asian American Studies courses and Asian American student residence.

Kara Takasaki is a post-doctoral fellow at the IC2 Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. She earned her PhD in Sociology from UT Austin and her MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago. She studies race and gender inequality in workplaces and in personal relationships. Kara has published in the Journal of Intercultural Management and Ethics, the Journal of Asian American Studies, the Michigan Family Review, and the Journal Committed to Social Change on Race and Ethnicity.

Cynthia Wang is an Assistant Professor in the department of Communication Studies at California State University, Los Angeles. She is interested in the impact of digital communication technologies and social media on social relations, cultural practices, and power dynamics, particularly framed in perspectives of time and temporality. Her work can be found in journals like Social Media + Society and Time & Society, and she is the co-editor of the book, Indie Games in the Digital Age. She is also the founder of The arqive, a digital LGBTQ storytelling map. Her side gig is being a singer-songwriter, and her latest album, “Common Ground,” can be found anywhere you get your music.

Mu Wu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at California State University, Los Angeles. He earned his PhD from Pennsylvania State University. His research focuses on the social and psychological effects of new media and technology. In particular, he examines how newer social and mobile media interfaces can interact with media content, and how such interactions shape individuals’ perceptions and engagement with messages as well as interfaces via underlying psychological mechanisms. His work has been published in Journal of Media Psychology, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Computers in Human Behavior, and American Behavioral Scientist.

Liwei is a post-doctoral associate in the School of Social Work at Rutgers University. Liwei earned her Ph.D. in social work from New York University and received an MSW from Peking University, China. Liwei's scholarship focuses on the impact of economic instability and inequality on parental behaviors and children’s mental health, particularly among low-income, minority, and immigrant families. She has been examining the role of unstable economic experiences at the family level and geographic economic inequality at the community level in shaping families’ well-being. Liwei is particularly interested in exploring these questions in a multicultural context, as a way to inform community-based, culturally-competent policies that support families who may have specific challenges related to or exacerbated by economic circumstances.

Communications Manager, Quantitative Survey Committee Co-Lead

Amy Zhang is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. She is broadly interested in social relationships and health, social networks, and the sociology of emotions. Her current research investigates how psychopathology impacts the benefits of socializing, the health profiles of Black women tenure-track faculty, and the social network Parler.