I am a doctoral researcher in Social Work at Fudan University, and in Social and Public Policy at the University of Eastern Finland. I am also a research member of the Sino–Finnish Child Protection Research Center. My research sits at the intersection of child welfare and child protection, family social work, and welfare governance, with a particular interest in how policy designs are translated into frontline services and how fragmented systems can be coordinated. In my doctoral dissertation at Fudan, i investigates the complexity of China’s child protection system. At the University of Eastern Finland, my dissertation explores how inclusion environment of EU countries from gender perspective. I am also working on the Finnish child welfare system and policy reforms.
Regarding my PhD project at Fudan University:
This project adopts an embedded case study design, focusing on a support service program for disadvantaged children in H City, China. A mixed-data collection approach is employed, including participatory observation, literature analysis, in-depth interviews with 172 stakeholders, and over 300 questionnaires. The study systematically examines multiple levels (city, district, street/town, villages, government office, social organizations, frontline workers, and service recipients) to address the core research question: How can a coordinated, continuous, and institutionally resilient service delivery system be built to more effectively identify, intervene in, and continuously support disadvantaged children and their families?
Regarding my PhD project at the University of Eastern Finland:
This project focuses on gender inequality in European welfare states. Despite formal commitments to gender equality, gaps persist in pay, poverty, and participation. The dissertation reframes these gaps through a gendered welfare-society lens, arguing that outcomes are co-produced by an interacting welfare mix of family arrangements, labor-market opportunity structures, and state support. Using four quantitative studies with harmonized Eurostat country-year panel data (approx. 2006–2023) and fixed-effects models with interaction and nonlinear tests, the study finds that later childbearing is associated with smaller gender pay gaps, while employment gains can coexist with wider pay gaps. Child poverty is strongly linked to unemployment, early school leaving, and inequality, with partial buffering from public expenditure and selective moderation by women’s political empowerment. Empowerment also relates to higher social protection effort, especially in health and old age, with threshold-like effects that strengthen under higher inequality. Finally, welfare design matters for intersectional inclusion: total social protection expenditure is positively associated with immigrant women’s entrepreneurship, but old-age expenditure is positive while family-and-children expenditure is negative, highlighting compositional trade-offs and the need for care-enabling, quality-focused, and gender-inclusive policy mixes.