Leafia Ye

Researcher

University of Toronto

Contact Details

• leafia.ye@utoronto.ca

Dr. Leafia Ye is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2023, with a minor in Statistics and Data Sciences. She also holds a Bachelor’s degree (Sociology and German) from the University of Hong Kong. 

As a demographer and sociologist, Dr. Ye studies challenges that deter immigrants’ integration into host societies and specializes in understanding how inequalities evolve over the life course. One stream of her research focuses on how immigration status (being foreign-born, being undocumented) impacts individuals’ economic well-being as they age. Another stream seeks to understand the implication of immigrants’ social, economic, and residential integration for their long-term health outcomes. 

Dr. Ye’s work on immigration and aging has received the American Sociological Association (ASA)’s Award for Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship in Population, the Southern Demographic Association’s Everett Lee Graduate Paper Award, and the ASA Award for Best Graduate Student Paper in Aging and the Life Course. She is currently the Principal Investigator of a project funded by an R21 grant from the U.S. National Institute on Aging, in which she leverages cross-national comparisons to understand the link between immigrant integration and later-life health.