Professor of Social Policy and Social Work
Director, China Center for Social Policy
Member, Committee on Global Thought
Qin Gao is Professor of Social Policy and Social Work at Columbia University’s School of Social Work and Director of Columbia University’s China Center for Social Policy. She is a faculty member of the Columbia Population Research Center, Committee on Global Thought, and Weatherhead East Asian Institute and a member of the Faculty Steering Committee for the Columbia Global Centers | Beijing. She is also an Academic Board Member of the China Institute for Income Distribution at Beijing Normal University and a Public Intellectual Fellow of the National Committee on United States-China Relations.
Dr. Gao’s research focuses on the Chinese welfare state in transition; welfare, work, and poverty in China; social protection for rural-to-urban migrants in China and Asian American immigrants; and cross-national comparative social policies and programs. Dr. Gao’s book, Welfare, Work, and Poverty: Social Assistance in China (Oxford University Press, 2017) presents a systematic evaluation of the world’s largest social welfare program, Dibao.
At the School of Social Work, Dr. Gao is the Chair of the Policy Division in the Master’s of Social Work (MSW) program. Dr. Gao teaches Global Social Policy and Advanced Research Methods and Statistics for Policy Practice at the master’s level and an Advanced Seminar on Inequality, Poverty, and Public Policy at the doctoral level.
Curriculum Vitae
Websites
Recent Publications
Media
Interviews by the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs; the Council on Foreign Relations; and SupChina’s Sinica Podcast.
Education
- Ph.D., Social Policy, Columbia University
- M.A., Sociology and Social Work, Peking University
- B.A., Social Work, China Youth University of Political Studies