(Sukie) Xiuqi Yang

Sukie Xiuqi Yang is a Ph.D. student in Sociology and Demography and an MA student in Statistics and Data Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She has conducted research on the sociology of education, child development, and social stratification. She is also developing her dissertation project investigating climate education globally.

Yang has studied the effects of parental migration on child health and cognitive growth in China. She developed a causal framework to study migration as a time-varying process and revealed more nuanced relationships between the timing and duration of repeated parental outmigration and early childhood development. Yang has presented these works at academic conferences, and they are currently being revised and resubmitted for journal publications.

In addition, Yang is examining the intersection of climate risk, environmental hazards like air pollution, and education. She collaborated on a paper linking demographic data and pollution estimates in South China. Her research was funded by the Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report Fellowship, UNESCO, to analyze climate hazards and children's schooling in Sub-Saharan Africa. The findings resulting from the project are featured in the policy paper by UNESCO at COP28.

Currently, Yang is working on her dissertation. Leveraging a newly constructed international dataset, her dissertation project aims to address two objectives: (1) examine the influence of global pressures, domestic politics, and school characteristics on the institutionalization of climate education and the alignment between policy rhetoric and classroom realities; and (2) explore how school and family socialization processes impact the formation of pro-environmental identities among students while controlling for differential climate risks and other socialization channels such as government and media.