Students on the Job Market 2024-25

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.

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.

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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.

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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Rachel/Zhe Zhang is a Sociology Ph.D. Candidate and Graduate Instructor at the University at Buffalo. Her research asks how neighborhoods shape experiences of health, crime, and family relationships using quantitative methods. She is currently working on her dissertation, and her dissertation studies the effect of neighborhood characteristics and changes (i.e., gentrification) on the well-being of individuals and families from the life-course perspective. Meanwhile, she is also working on other research projects. For example, examining the urban and rural differences in adolescents’ delinquent behaviors and drug use, across cohorts, using the Monitoring the Future (MTF) survey.