I am an organizational sociologist studying entrepreneurial and household finance. My research examines how the ecological dynamics of organizations shape the allocation of capital and credit. I am currently a Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Princeton University, and I received my PhD in Sociology from UCLA in 2025.
I was born and raised in Miaoli, Taiwan, and spent most of my school years in Hsinchu and Taipei. After college, I served in the Taiwan Air Force as a radar operator for the HAWK air-defense missile system. I also worked at the Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica: first as an undergraduate assistant in my senior year, conducting in-depth interviews with small Taiwanese family businesses in manufacturing, and later as a research assistant, building and analyzing longitudinal data on Taiwanese firms and large corporations before I began my doctoral program.
My passion for organizational theory (OT) grew out of a long struggle to find something that could link the rise of finance to stratification. That feeling of something missing in between turned out to be a generative hole, one that not only guided me into the OT world but also kept ideas popping up throughout the lonely but exciting process of dissertating. Luckily, the dissertation was funded by three competitive grants: the Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (American Sociological Association), the Dissertation Year Fellowship (UCLA), and the Taiwanese Overseas Pioneers Grant (National Science and Technology Council, Taiwan).
In my last two years at UCLA, I played OT missionary: I built a community by founding the Organizations and Markets Working Group (acronym: OMG), spread the OT faith (especially population ecology), and treated the occasional symptom (whenever a patient applied OT inaccurately).
Moving to Princeton has taken me physically farther from Silicon Valley — yet, with my freshly minted ecologist brain, I find myself thinking more about that irrational place. My new project with Olav Sorenson, The Deregulated Venture Capital Boom, examines how banking deregulation fueled the VC boom of the 1990s through the consolidation of commercial banks. Building on this, Olav, Luisa Gagliardi, and I are now studying how the landscape of entrepreneurial finance has shifted over the past two decades. Stay tuned for what we find!
By the way, when I’m away from the computer, I’m a recreational tennis player and amateur street photographer (with a Fujifilm X-T50).