Yiqi Zhu

Yiqi Zhu is an assistant professor at Adelphi University School of Social Work. Dr. Zhu’s scholarship aims to develop and support strategies to improve rural families’ well-being in response to rapid globalization, urbanization and modernization. She has conducted research and consultant work on food security, nutritional well-being, and educational attainment with organizations in China, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India.

Dr. Zhu’s dissertation research in upland regions on the border of China and Vietnam, supported by the Brown School International Dissertation Scholarship, used mixed methods to analyze the food security and nutritional well-being of families with parents who are migrant workers. She conducted focused ethnography with families living in upland regions. She used various rural appraisal tools such as transit maps, food diary, food listings and food matrix scoring to understand the transition of diets, food security, and coping mechanisms of local families. She also collected anthropometric measures of students to estimate the prevalence of undernutrition in the regions and investigated the macro, mezzo, and micro factors associated with food insecurity and undernutrition in the region. She also collected survey data to confirm and compare the qualitative finding from fieldwork and built an agent-based model to assimilate how the restricted migration policy impacted the wealth accumulation of upland families and led to the concentration of poverty in certain regions.

Dr. Zhu’s teaching experience includes courses in statistics, international social and economic policies and programs, and evaluation of programs and policies.

Research Interests: International Social Welfare; Food Security; Rural Development; Child Welfare