About me

My main main research interests are in health and labor. I am particularly interested in Alzheimer’s disease and its spillover effects on family members, the economics of long term care for patients with neurodegenerative diseases, as well as the influences of neonatal and early childhood experience on adult health and labor market outcomes. I also have an interest in the Chinese economy and social problems in China.

Before pivoting to a career in academic research, I worked in education in mainland China. First I was an ESL teacher and I studied Chinese in my free time. Following that, I taught high school World History and served as teaching assistant for credit bearing courses in Economics offered through UCLA Extension in an international high school program that is overseen by UCLA in the city of Nanjing. I have also taught R programming and consider myself to be an R evangelist. (I made this website in RStudio!) From fall 2022 until spring 2024, I served as a part-time teaching assistant again for courses for MPA students in Public Economics and Program Evaluation & Data Analysis at the Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania.

During the ten years I spent in China, I traveled widely and managed to visit over 30 cities. I have also lived in Japan (1 year), Mexico (1 summer), Finland (10 months) and the United Kingdom (about 6 months). I still speak and read Mandarin Chinese pretty well. My Japanese is extremely rusty. I know almost no Spanish or Finnish.

This is a map of all the places I’ve lived and remember having visited for at least a weekend while I lived in China. (I’m certain I’ve forgotten some.)

(This map was made with the mapchina package.)