Congratulations, Yue Qin!
Yue Qin has been selected as recipients of the 2026 American Sociological Association Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (ASA DDRIG). This highly competitive national award, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), recognizes doctoral students who demonstrate exceptional promise in advancing sociological knowledge. The grant will provide vital financial support to enhance the methodological quality and data collection efforts for their dissertation research. Receiving this funding underscores the significant scientific and societal impact of Yue’s scholarship and research within the broader academic community.
Yue’s dissertation, “Educational Advantage and Cognitive Health: Life-Course Mechanisms across School, Work, and Family,” asks how educational inequality shapes cognitive health across the life course. Cognitive diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease become increasingly consequential in aging societies, and education has been identified as one of the strongest protective factors for later-life cognition. However, the social mechanisms underlying their relationship remain insufficiently understood. Her dissertation develops a cross-institutional life-course framework that conceptualizes education not simply as an individual-level resource or status, but as a social institution through which advantages and disadvantages are generated and transmitted across schooling, work, and family contexts to shape cognitive health in later life. Chapter 1 of the dissertation has been published in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior (2026).