Yue Sun

Background

My interest in sociology began during college after reading Exchange and Power in Social Life. I chose to study health because nearly every social factor influences health outcomes, making health a powerful lens through which to understand broader social processes and inequalities. In many ways, health serves as a cumulative indicator of the social conditions people experience throughout their lives. The environment is another area of interest for me because I grew up in a coal-mining town. This experience made me aware of the unequal distribution of environmental hazards and sparked my interest in examining how the natural environment shapes population health and contributes to social inequalities. Before joining the University of Hawaiʻi, I was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Education

• PhD, Sociology, Syracuse University, 2024
• MA, Sociology, Syracuse University, 2019
• MA, Sociology, Zhejiang University, 2017
• BA, Public Administration, East China University of Science and Technology, 2015

Courses

• SOC 176: Introduction to Data Analysis

Research

My research interests sit at the intersection of medical sociology, spatial demography, population health, and environmental sociology. My scholarship seeks to use a political economy approach to understand how geographic disparities in health and mortality emerge and become exacerbated through the natural environment, socioeconomic contexts, and other spatialized forces. A theme that arises most often in my applied work is examining how political environments contribute to health disparities by shaping the distribution (and importance) of environmental hazards and socioeconomic resources within local spaces. I use advanced quantitative methods such as causal mediation analysis, spatial models, and Bayesian statistics to answer these interdisciplinary and policy-relevant research questions. My work has been published in Social Science & Medicine, Population and Environment, Health & Place, Population Research and Policy Review, Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, Journal of Rural Health, Journal of Applied Gerontology, and American Journal of Public Health.