PhD Students on the Market

Jonas Adams is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University at Buffalo. His research examines the social and material construction of place, with a focus on how social, legal and ecological dynamics shape the development and redevelopment of cities of different sizes. His work also explores how popular and academic ideas about cities, nature and their relationship have developed over time and influenced urban ecological design.

Yu-An Chen is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University at Buffalo. Her research examines how socioeconomic conditions and social connectedness shape health outcomes across the life course. Grounded in fundamental cause theory and the life course perspective, her dissertation investigates asset and debt trajectories from middle age to later life and their relationships with chronic disease and depression. She also examines how childhood socioeconomic status can shape mental health through romantic relationships and gendered pathways among middle-aged couples, as well as the role of social support in the relationship between wealth and health later in life. Beyond her dissertation, Yu-An studies how different dimensions of individual and community social capital can lead to different health outcomes.

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.

Chandler Fairbanks is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University at Buffalo. His dissertation examines how bisexual individuals fit into the family landscape, with a particular focus on how gender and sexual identity shape romantic relationships among sexual minority couples. His work explores how these identities intersect in ways that can both complement and complicate relationship experiences.

Chandler also works on collaborative projects examining relationship quality and health within interracial couples, the effects of adult children's stressors on parents' cognitive functioning and how attitudes toward marriage predict risk-taking behaviors during the transition to adulthood. He teaches Basic Statistics for the Social Sciences and Sociology of Families, using hands-on opportunities to help students apply sociological methods to real-world questions. His research on sexual minorities in romantic relationships received the Nathalie Devine Howe Award for Outstanding Scholarship and a grant from the Mark Diamond Research Fund.

Ting-Hui Lin is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University at Buffalo. She is a medical sociologist whose research examines how social inequality, political contexts and place-based conditions shape population health. Her dissertation investigates how structural vulnerability, local health care infrastructure and partisan environments shape geographic disparities in COVID-19 vaccination rates across U.S. counties and states using multilevel and spatially referenced data. One article from this project received the 2026 Health, Health Policy and Health Services Division Graduate Student Paper Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems.

Her earlier research examined guide dog use, mobility and autonomy among people with visual impairments in Taiwan. This work received the Outstanding Thesis Award in Disability Studies from the National Taiwan Library.

Short Bio
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.

Tucker Reyes is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University at Buffalo. His research examines law and culture and how their intersection shapes inequality in the criminal and civil legal systems. His dissertation uses mixed methods to study subprime auto lending, with a focus on consumer experiences, legal rights, dispute resolution and the conditions within the market that can contribute to criminal behavior.

Grace Sementilli is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University at Buffalo. Her research focuses on eviction and housing instability, the role of the private sector in low-income and subsidized housing and relationships between landlords and tenants. Her dissertation uses quantitative and qualitative methods to examine contemporary public-private partnerships between U.S. public housing authorities and privately owned redevelopment and management firms. She studies how these partnerships, which typically seek to redevelop existing public housing into mixed-income communities, affect low-income residents and their interactions with private-sector actors and systems.

Grace has also developed and taught undergraduate courses in criminology, urban sociology and the sociology of immigration, as well as Introduction to Sociology and Basic Statistics for the Social Sciences. Her teaching experience and student course evaluations earned her the Department of Sociology and Criminology's 2026 Adeline Gordon Levine Excellence in Teaching Award.

Zhe Wang is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University at Buffalo. His research focuses on family, development and migration, examining social change in the context of China's urbanization. He is particularly interested in the migration behavior, institutional identity and spatial integration of migrant workers. His dissertation examines how family responsibilities shape migration decisions among Chinese migrant workers. More broadly, his research explores the intersections of migration, family life and China's urbanization process.

Logan Phlox Wilder is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University at Buffalo. Their research focuses on the intersections of work, technology and gender. Their dissertation examines how these forces shape the experiences of transgender and nonbinary online sex workers, including how workers use gendered personas to navigate the digital marketplace and pursue financial and emotional benefits. Logan also studies how legal policies, website terms of service and social media algorithms can constrain or enable online sex work.

Beyond their dissertation, Logan has co-authored research examining depictions of violence in introductory sociology textbooks.