Chin-fen Chang is a full-time Research Fellow at the Institute of Sociology of Academia Sinica in Taiwan.

Currently she is working a book on The Sociology of Labor Markets, to be published in Chinese, addressed to a Chinese audience. As part of the book, but also for separate article publication, she works on another two specific empirical projects at Stanford, both of which are comparative analyses among East Asian Countries (mainly Japan, Korea, and Taiwan).

Even though employed women are still overrepresented in poorly-paid, low-status jobs, the gender wage gap has narrowed over the past two decades in most countries. A similar trend occurred in the East Asian region too. However, it remains unknown whether the smaller gender wage gap is a result of better endowments of women (more education and work experience, factors emphasized by human capital theory) or of more comparable returns for women's qualifications (supporting institutional perspectives and/or contributions of women's movements in reducing discrimination). This project utilizes the decomposition method to solve the puzzle.

The second project aims to compare differences of social identities among East Asian countries. In addition to the class perspective as being conventionally used in the past literature, this paper will compare gender differences of the status evaluation from a feminist perspective.

One of her recent publications in English is: "The employment discontinuity of married women in Taiwan: Job status, ethnic background and motherhood ethnic background and motherhood," Current Sociology, 54(2): 209-228. Her website in IOS is: http://www.ios.sinica.edu.tw/ios/index.php?pid=23&id=115

Chang got her Ph.D. in Sociology from The Ohio State University (1989), M.A. in Sociology from the University of Iowa (1986), and B.A. in Economics from National Taiwan University (1980). She served as the chief editor of Taiwanese Journal of Sociology from the year of 2004 to 2006.

Jeremy Goldhaber-Fiebert, PhD, is a Professor of Health Policy, a Core Faculty Member at the Center for Health Policy and the Department of Health Policy, and a Faculty Affiliate of the Stanford Center on Longevity and Stanford Center for International Development. His research focuses on complex policy decisions surrounding the prevention and management of increasingly common, chronic diseases and the life course impact of exposure to their risk factors. In the context of both developing and developed countries including the US, India, China, and South Africa, he has examined chronic conditions including type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, human papillomavirus and cervical cancer, tuberculosis, and hepatitis C and on risk factors including smoking, physical activity, obesity, malnutrition, and other diseases themselves. He combines simulation modeling methods and cost-effectiveness analyses with econometric approaches and behavioral economic studies to address these issues. Dr. Goldhaber-Fiebert graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1997, with an A.B. in the History and Literature of America. After working as a software engineer and consultant, he conducted a year-long public health research program in Costa Rica with his wife in 2001. Winner of the Lee B. Lusted Prize for Outstanding Student Research from the Society for Medical Decision Making in 2006 and in 2008, he completed his PhD in Health Policy concentrating in Decision Science at Harvard University in 2008. He was elected as a Trustee of the Society for Medical Decision Making in 2011.

Past and current research topics:

1. Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular risk factors: Randomized and observational studies in Costa Rica examining the impact of community-based lifestyle interventions and the relationship of gender, risk factors, and care utilization.
2. Cervical cancer: Model-based cost-effectiveness analyses and costing methods studies that examine policy issues relating to cervical cancer screening and human papillomavirus vaccination in countries including the United States, Brazil, India, Kenya, Peru, South Africa, Tanzania, and Thailand.
3. Measles, haemophilus influenzae type b, and other childhood infectious diseases: Longitudinal regression analyses of country-level data from middle and upper income countries that examine the link between vaccination, sustained reductions in mortality, and evidence of herd immunity.
4. Patient adherence: Studies in both developing and developed countries of the costs and effectiveness of measures to increase successful adherence. Adherence to cervical cancer screening as well as to disease management programs targeting depression and obesity is examined from both a decision-analytic and a behavioral economics perspective.
5. Simulation modeling methods: Research examining model calibration and validation, the appropriate representation of uncertainty in projected outcomes, the use of models to examine plausible counterfactuals at the biological and epidemiological level, and the reflection of population and spatial heterogeneity.

Angie Ngoc Trần is a professor in the Division of Social and Behavioral Sciences and Global Studies at California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB).  Her plan as the 2008 Lee Kong Chian National University of Singapore-Stanford University Distinguished Fellow is to complete a book manuscript on labor-capital relations in Vietnam that highlights how different identities of investors and owners—shaped by government policies, ethnicity, characteristics of investment, and the role they played in global flexible production—affect workers’ conditions, consciousness, and collective action differently.

Tran spent May-July 2008 at Stanford and will return to campus for the second half of November 2008.  She will share the results of her project in a public seminar at Stanford under SEAF auspices on November 17 2008.

Prof. Trần’s many publications include “Contesting ‘Flexibility’:  Networks of Place, Gender, and Class in Vietnamese Workers’ Resistance,” in Taking Southeast Asia to Market (2008); “Alternatives to ‘Race to the Bottom’ in Vietnam:  Minimum Wage Strikes and Their Aftermath,” Labor Studies Journal (December 2007); “The Third Sleeve: Emerging Labor Newspapers and the Response of Labor Unions and the State to Workers’ Resistance in Vietnam,” Labor Studies Journal (September 2007); and (as co-editor and author) Reaching for the Dream:  Challenges of Sustainable Development in Vietnam (2004).  She received her Ph.D. in Political Economy and Public Policy at the University of Southern California in 1996 and an M.A. in Developmental Economics at USC in 1991.