Postdoctoral Research Associate, Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences (S4) and Population Studies
Background
David Chunyu works as a Postdoctoral Research Associate with John Logan (Sociology and S4 Director) at S4. His major research interests are migration, race and ethnicity, and urban sociology. His methods are primarily empirical and quantitative, but often rely on qualitative data to corroborate and supplement the quantitative results. He is also interested in conducting research from a comparative perspective. Chunyu’s research on migration focuses on three aspects: immigrant integration, international migration movement, and internal migration in China. For his dissertation, he studied the labor-market integration of two major immigrant groups in the U.S., Mexicans and Chinese labor immigrants. He considered three types of outcomes: entrepreneurship, job transition, and earnings growth. Another area of his research is residential segregation in American metropolises, focusing on inequality in the locational attainment between different racial/ethnic groups. His work has two key components: to use national census-tract level datasets to calculate a series of dissimilarity and exposure indices for various racial/ethnic groups in every metropolitan area, and to create GIS maps to identify urban neighborhoods and capture the aggregate characteristics of such neighborhoods. These maps can help him to both visualize the spatial distribution of people across the city and conduct spatial analysis on various research topics.
Chunyu received his PhD in Sociology from University at Albany-SUNY in 2010. Also at Albany he received his Certificate in Demography in 2004.