Xi Song

Xi Song is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Arts & Sciences, holding the Schiffman Family Presidential title. She is also an Associate Director of the Penn Population Studies Center and affiliated with the International Max Planck Research School for Population, Health, and Data Science. Her research focuses on social mobility, occupational restructuring, Asian American studies, and quantitative methodologies.

Education: Ph.D. in Sociology (UCLA, 2015), M.S. in Statistics (UCLA, 2013), M.Phil. in Sociology (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2010), B.A. in Sociology (Renmin University of China, 2008).

Key research areas include the consequences of occupational changes in the U.S., intergenerational mobility among Asian Americans, and the “Model Minority” narrative. She has developed novel indices like the occupational percentile rank measure and advanced demographic models for kinship dynamics and multigenerational mobility. Her work bridges sociology with quantitative methods, including Markov chain models and machine learning for occupational coding.

Awards include the 2021 William Julius Wilson Early Career Award (ASA) and the 2022 Mentor of the Year Award (UPenn Sociology). Her publications have been recognized by the ASA, ISA-RC28, and Demographic Research. She serves on editorial boards for top journals like the American Journal of Sociology and Demography.

Teaching includes advanced courses on panel data analysis and categorical data analysis. Her lab’s current projects explore long-term trends in social mobility and the intersection of race, labor markets, and education in the U.S.