Students on the Job Market 2025-26

Short Bio: Gabriela Ceja is a PhD candidate at the University at Buffalo. She examines the production of urban space and the socio-environmental inequalities of industrial development. Using qualitative research methods, she examines the narratives, aesthetics, forms of privatization and exclusion of "eco-luxury" enclaves in the Mexican Caribbean; as well as the forms of racialization and environmental injustice endured by tourism migrant workers. Gabriela has also worked as a labor organizer in the New York City area, where she produced numerous art and education projects with diverse communities.

Shiyue Cui is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University at Buffalo. Her research focuses on international migration, environmental sociology, and social inequality. Her dissertation combines quantitative data analysis with qualitative interviews to comprehensively examine refugees' resettlement experiences in New York State. Her research demonstrates that family and gender practices play a crucial role in shaping their employment prospects and cultural capital accumulation. Additionally, Shiyue investigates displacement, mobility, and population dynamics among vulnerable communities. She also uses algorithms to analyze post-disaster mobility with large mobile phone data.

Kathleen D'Alfonso is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology and Criminology who has extensive experience teaching both in person and online, specifically having served as the instructor of record for 17 courses with class sizes ranging from 21 to 75 students. Kathleen's commitment to teaching mentorship has led to invitations to present at TA orientations, lead campus workshops, and speak on the Teaching Table Podcast at the University at Buffalo. Through these efforts, she has sought to cultivate communities of practice that extend the impact of inclusive pedagogy across departments and institutions. Simultaneously, Kathleen's research interests are focused on health insurance status across the life course with particular attention in the dissertation on the transition to adulthood. She additionally has a working paper investigating whether the association between insurance status (being privately, publicly, or uninsured) and two dimensions of health varies by nativity and citizenship.

My research seeks to understand social drivers and consequences of chronic conditions, with a special focus on chronic pain. My projects include an analysis on the effects of chronic pain on social relationships, a macro-level examination of 50 years of scholarship on pain-related inequalities across sociodemographic groups, and establishing a framework for analyzing social determinants and consequences of pain at individual, interpersonal, and macro levels. Additionally, I explore how divergent macro-sociopolitical and cultural contexts shape health inequalities across the globe. My research reveals that pain prevalence and educational disparities in pain vary substantially across U.S. states, and that cross-state variations are a function of state-level income inequality and social cohesion. Beyond the U.S., I also study health inequalities in non-Western contexts. I demonstrated that the critical cultural meanings embedded in smoking and alcohol use in China contribute to high prevalence and attenuated social gradients in unhealthy health behaviors and health outcomes (published in SSM-Population Health). My dissertation continues my inquiries aforementioned with the life course perspective. My first paper argues that wartime trauma is a strong but overlooked predictor of ill health, particularly in Asian countries. I find that war exposures contribute to strikingly high risks of pain through “psychological scarring” process among older Vietnamese. My second paper examines whether socioeconomic deprivation leads to cumulative stress exposures throughout the life course, ultimately resulting in a higher risk of pain in later life in the U.S. My third paper studies the effects of welfare states. It explores to what extent welfare regimes affect the strengths of the association between socioeconomic adversities in childhood and later-life chronic pain.

Short Bio: Eileen Keh is currently a PhD student at the University at Buffalo. Her overall research interests center around family sociology, medical sociology, research methods, social issues in East Asia and cross-national comparisons. Her dissertation focuses mainly on how parental SES affects parenting styles and children’s well-being in China. In her Master thesis, Eileen compared how the United States and Taiwan differ in SES effects of satisfaction in health care systems.

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Byung Soo Lee is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. His research focuses on how Asian immigrant families in the United States experience the changes of family relations and the narratives of the families that reveal the gap between the subjective perception of family relations and the structural changes in a given society. His current research examines how Asian immigrant family members interpret the meaning of eldercare with the intersection of gendered experiences.

Ting-Hui Lin is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. She is primarily a medical sociologist with a strong focus on social inequality. Her current research bridges political sociology, population health, and spatial demography, examining how structural vulnerabilities and political contexts shape disparities in COVID-19 vaccination uptake across the United States. Grounded in Fundamental Cause Theory and the Social Determinants of Health framework, her dissertation employs multilevel modeling across counties and states, integrating spatially referenced indicators from the Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) and measures of local healthcare infrastructure to analyze geographic variation in COVID-19 vaccination uptake. Her previous work, grounded in disability studies, investigated how visually impaired individuals in Taiwan use guide dogs as tools for mobility and autonomy. This research was recognized with the Outstanding Thesis Award in Disability Studies from the National Taiwan Library.

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Laura Obernesser is a family sociologist. Her qualitative research focuses on how individuals idealize family, make sense of their relationships and roles within families and the effects these understandings have on their everyday experiences. Her research focuses on (1) family ideals: the desires, fears, and expectations held by individuals within families related to family life and how inequalities have effects on how individuals understand their relationship to societal expectations in the context of changing families and (2) agency: the behaviors and thoughts families engage in to cope with, and sometimes change their realities.

Her dissertation work focuses on the role ambiguity between grandparents and their adult children (parents) in rural families and how these care givers make sense of their family roles, relationships, and realities in the context of COVID-19. In her study, she examines parenting and grandparenting roles, class and gender inequalities, and how individuals within these families experience stress related to childcare and family.

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Anupriya Pandey is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Her research engages environmental sociology, critical social theory, and comparative racial and ethnic studies, with a specific focus on caste, labor, and agrarian political ecologies in South Asia. Anchored in long-term ethnographic fieldwork and historical-archival research in Bihar, India, her dissertation develops the framework of Critical Caste Ecologies to examine how caste hierarchies are materially and institutionally reproduced through everyday infrastructures such as agrochemical shops and solar irrigation systems. She investigates how caste-based claims to land, labor, expertise, and legitimacy are reconfigured amid the expansion of chemically intensive farming and climate resilience interventions. More broadly, she is interested in how agrarian livelihoods, ecological degradation, and caste intersect to shape socio-environmental hierarchies and produce differentiated vulnerabilities.

I am a political sociologist and qualitative researcher. I am broadly interested in the intersections of political extremism, state power, social movements and social ties. My dissertation research examines the ways that the state-abdicated responsibility to address rightwing extremism has left kinship networks to do the work of addressing radicalization in ways that are bound to fail. In particular, my research looks at the growing phenomenon of middle-aged and older extremists, and how family dynamics and historical and structural barriers, such as rightwing media and the Covid pandemic, impact the efforts of adult children, nieces, nephews and lifetime friends as they labor to combat the radicalization of their loved ones. I also have several law and society and criminology projects in development, examining rural vs urban juvenile delinquency trends over time, the legal consciousness of parents of children with preventable birth injuries, and prosecutors perspectives on the impact of body-worn cameras on the adjudication of domestic violence cases.

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Srushti Upadhyay is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at The University at Buffalo. Upadhyay’s research focuses on gender and precarious work in the digital age. Currently, she is working on her dissertation which uses sugar dating as a case study to understand the complex and multidirectional intersections between technology, intimacy, and economy. She is also working on collaborative projects examining depictions of violence in introductory Sociology textbooks. Upadhyay has been awarded the Advanced PhD Dissertation Fellowship by University at Buffalo’s Gender Institute (2023-2024).

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My substantive research centers on life course and aging, with a particular focus on how the timing of historical events shapes cognitive aging and how factors from childhood and midlife influence later-life cognitive outcomes. I also investigate the role of chronic pain and its various dimensions of interference in contributing to cognitive function. Methodologically, my work includes: (1) using measurement models to assess the validity and reliability of cognitive measures over time; (2) applying causal inference approaches, such as propensity score models, to examine selection effects within productive aging theory; and (3) evaluating the validity of large language models for data extraction in scoping reviews across diverse questions and article types.