Sukie Xiuqi Yang

University of Pennsylvania

Based in

United States
Asia

Sukie Xiuqi Yang is a Ph.D. candidate 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. She also co-proposed a project for UNESCO analyzing climate hazards and children’s schooling in Sub-Saharan Africa, and the findings resulting from the project are featured in the policy paper of UNESCO, “Education for Climate Change: Learning to Act for People and Planet” (published at COP28).

Currently, Yang is working on her dissertation to analyze how the inclusion of climate change in the national curriculum impacts students’ environmental literacy and behaviors globally. Using international datasets, she examines the relationships between climate education and student outcomes across cognitive, emotional, and behavioral dimensions.