Lijun Song is an Associate Professor of Sociology, MHS (Medicine, Health, and Society), and Asian Studies, and Director of the SNAIL (Social Networks and Inequalities Lab). Her research examines how societies produce and reproduce inequalities, with a focus on social networks, singlehood, and health. She introduced and empirically tested social cost theory and is advancing a relational resource–cost framework that integrates this perspective with social capital theory to provide a balanced understanding of the benefits and costs of social networks. She is currently leading an NIH R56-funded project ($1.3 million) that has successfully fielded the first-ever nationally representative pilot survey of older never-married adults, developing innovative survey instruments and establishing new data infrastructure for this rapidly growing yet understudied population.
Her scholarship has appeared in such journals as Social Forces, Social Science Research, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Society and Mental Health, Social Networks, Social Psychology Quarterly, Social Science and Medicine, and Work and Occupations. Her work has garnered support from institutions such as the National Institutes of Health, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange. She has secured over $15 million in research funding, with $1.5 million as a Principal Investigator and $14 million as a Co-Investigator. She has received two publication awards from the American Sociological Association (ASA): one from the Section on Asia/Asian America and another from the ASA Section on Sociology of Mental Health. She has been elected to chair two ASA Sections: Medical Sociology and Sociology of Mental Health. For more information, please refer to her curriculum vitae, Google Scholar page, and ResearchGate page.