Wenjing Wang

Affiliate Faculty

Anthropology: Social Complexity and Inequality, Social Interaction, Regional Demographic Analysis, Population Centralization and Decentralization, Quantitative and Spatial Analysis

Wenjing Wang is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Immigration Research (IIR). She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Pittsburgh in 2017, and her BA in Archaeology from Jilin University, China in 2011. Her specialties include regional demographic analysis, quantitative data analysis, spatial statistics, and GIS.

She is interested in the development of sociopolitical complexity and social inequality, with a strong focus on the comparative approach. She is specialized in spatial analysis of social phenomenon. Her research takes the anthropological perspective, using cross-cultural understandings, to shed new light on the studies of migration and immigration in the ancient and modern world. Her previous research explored the social organization of Lingjiatan communities in prehistorical China through the reconstruction of regional population and social interactions. She also has participated in fieldwork in Peru and Kenya.

Dr. Wang's knowledge of statistical, spatial and computational models make her able to direct research projects to investigate collective activities and behaviors of U.S immigrants through analyzing large-scale demographic, behavioral and network data. With advanced quantitative skills, Dr. Wang currently is managing Immigration Data on Demand (iDod) project at IIR to help institutions, researchers and governments in the United States to examine the immigration populations of their particular geography. Dr. Wang has years of experiences in survey research and longitudinal studies. Her experiences in survey methodology, statistical inference, regression modeling, exploratory data analysis, and mathematical demography allow her to lead this project, to guide graduate students to collect and combine data from multiple sources, design and develop tools and techniques for analysis, and evaluate, document and communicate research processes, analyses and results to peer institutions, researchers and governments.