I am Minheng Chen, a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of British Columbia. My research sits at the intersection of urban sociology, the sociology of health, and social stratification. I examine how structural transformations in housing, labor, and community life shape health inequalities, class formation, and everyday experiences across the life course. Methodologically, I use both survey data and qualitative and reflexive approaches to connect macro-level change with lived experience. My current works focus on temporal and cohort patterns of housing ownership and stratification, as well as how past everyday experiences shape later-life living environments, social networks, and ideological orientations.

Urban studies in housing and community; Sociology of health; Social stratification; Ideology and socialism; China studies

Peer-reviewed Articles

Chen, M., Fu, Y., Guo, X., & Fu, Q. (2026). Social isolation by design: Bias in measuring core networks in Taiwan? Social Networks, 85, 1-12.
Gu, J., Chen, M., Yuan, Y., Guo, X., Zhou, T. Y., & Fu, Q. (2024). Drink like a Man? Modified Poisson Analysis of Adolescent Binge Drinking in the US, 1976–2022. Social Science & Medicine
Zhu, Y., Chen, M., & Su, H. (2024). The Big Contradiction Between the Dream and the Reality of Homeownership: Access To Homeownership In Canada, 1986–2016. Housing Studies, 1-27.
Gu, J., Guo, X., Liu, X., Yuan, Y., Zhu, Y., Chen, M., … & Fu, Q. (2023). Gone with the weed: incidents of adolescent marijuana use in the United States, 1976–2021. Annals of epidemiology, 88, 23-29.
Guangye He, Minheng Chen. (2020). Detached from school: Behavioral difference within school teenager. Journal of East China University of Science and Technology (Social Science Edition). 35(06). 1-15+28. (in Chinese)

Book Chapter

Xin Guo, Minheng, Chen, and Qiang Fu. (2023). Count Models. In Liebe, Ulf (Eds.), Handbook of Quantitative Methods in Sociology. Publisher: Edward Elgar (upcoming)

Workshops & Conferences

Yanfei Yang, Minheng Chen (presenter), Qiang Fu. “A Hidden Transformation in Urban China: Social Inequalities in Overwork, 1993–2021”. Chinese Sociology Annual Conference, Chengdu, Sichuan, China, July 8, 2025
Minheng Chen. “Resistance of the Gray Hair in the post-COVID World: The Protest Against Medical Insurance Reform in Wuhan”. Northwestern China Forum. Vancouver, Canada, October 20, 2024
Minheng Chen. “The Proletariat as a Way of Collective Life: The Everyday Foundations of Class Identity in a Socialist Industrial Enclave”. 42nd Annual Qualitative Analysis Conference, Kelowna, Canada, June 15, 2023
Minheng Chen, Qiang Fu, Yushu Zhu. “The Rise and Fall of a Giant: An Institutional Analysis of a Planned Industrial City”. Urban Space and Citizenship in China Workshop, Suzhou, China, July 15, 2022
Minheng Chen (Session Coordinator), The future of sociological research in Canada within a diverse, rapidly changing, and transformative society, Annual meeting of Canadian Sociological Association, June 15, 2022

2025 Consortium on Analytics for Data-Driven Decision-Making (CAnD3) Fellowship
2024 Pan Tianshou Scholarship, Center for Chinese Research, UBC
2024 Graduate Research Award, UBC
2023 President’s Academic Excellence Initiative PhD Award
2023 Special UBC Graduate Scholarship-IAR Fellowship Award
2022 Faculty of Arts Graduate Award, UBC
2022 Special UBC Graduate Scholarship-IAR Fellowship, UBC
2021 Patricia Marchak International Research Scholarship in Sociology, UBC
2021 Sociology Graduate Scholarship, UBC

Teaching Assistant:

FMST210 : Family Context of Human Development