AAI Leadership

Qin Gao is Acting Director of the Asian American Initiative.  Dr. Gao is the Maurice V. Russell Professor of Social Policy and Social Work Practice in the School of Social Work at Columbia University, where she also serves as the Associate Dean for Doctoral Education. She is also the Founding Director of Columbia’s China Center for Social Policy. Her research examines poverty, inequality, social policy, and population well-being in China and among Asian Americans. She led The State of Chinese Americans Survey in 2022 and is a member of the New York City Longitudinal Survey of Wellbeing study research team. Dr. Gao holds a BA from China Youth University of Political Studies, an MA from Peking University, and an MPhil and PhD from Columbia University School of Social Work. She has been interviewed by multiple media outlets such as the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs; the Council on Foreign Relations; and SupChina’s Sinica Podcast. 

The Founding Director of the Initiative is Jennifer Lee, the Julian Clarence Levi Professor of Social Sciences and author of four-award winning books, including The Asian American Achievement Paradox. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Lee is also the Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Russell Sage Foundation—the first Asian American to hold this position—and Chair of The Asian American Foundation’s STAATUS Index (The Social Tracking of Asian Americans in the U.S.). Her essays and commentary have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and CNN among other venues. A proud alumna, she received her B.A. (’90), M.A. (’95), and Ph.D. (’98) from Columbia University.

Xi Song is a Professor of Sociology and a faculty member of the Asian American Initiative at Columbia University. Her research interests include social mobility, occupations and work, Asian Americans, population studies, and quantitative methodology. Song received the 2021 William Julius Wilson Early Career Award from the American Sociological Association. Her publications received multiple awards from the American Sociological Association (ASA), the International Sociological Association Research Committee on Social Stratification and Mobility (ISA-RC28), the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS), and the Demographic Research. She received the Mentor of the Year Award from the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania in 2022. She has served on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Sociology, Demography, Sociological Methodology, Social Science Research, and Research in Social Stratification and Mobility.

More information about her research can be found on her website. 

Shay Stulman is the 2025-26 AAI Research Fellow. She is a senior at Barnard College, majoring in Human Rights and History with a minor in Science and Public Policy. Shay is passionate about working at the intersection of academia, advocacy, and the arts. As a Laidlaw Scholar, she has researched environmental justice issues impacting low-income communities in the South. A Social Impact Fellow with Columbia World Projects, she has advocated for arts education for low-income Title I students in New York City. She works with various archives around NYC and with immigrant communities to raise awareness about cross-racial solidarity in Asian American organizing spaces. A flutist and Ryūteki player in Columbia’s Music Performance Program, Shay is overjoyed to serve as the inaugural summer fellow for the Asian American Initiative.

Kathleen Hoang is a TAAF Summer Intern. The daughter of Vietnamese refugees, she recently graduated from Columbia University, where she studied the afterlives of war through military history and empire. Over the past eight years, she has organized across grassroots and federal spaces— from OCA, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, the Southeast Asian Freedom Network, and the White House Initiative on AANHPI—and with author Viet Thanh Nguyen on literary and academic projects. This summer, she is working with The Asian American Foundation as a Data & Research intern. Beyond advocacy, she moves through fashion spaces as a site of memory and resistance, exploring how art, politics, and justice converge.

Dorothy Zhang is a TAAF Summer Intern. She is a computer science major at Barnard College. Her research at the Columbia Computational Design Lab with Professor Lydia Chilton focuses on the role that LLMs can serve in promoting effective communication of complex scientific topics. She previously interned as a Software Engineer Intern at Samsara and as a Machine Learning Intern at the Port of Seattle. She is passionate about gender equality and diversity in the technology industry and hopes to pursue a career in which she can help drive change in this area.