Nan Feng

Postdoctoral Scholar

Nan Feng is a postdoctoral researcher at Vanderbilt University. Previously, she was a postdoctoral reseracher at the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. She received her doctorate from Cornell University, where her research focused on how social inequality shapes the structure of social networks and access to resources. Feng’s work combines large-scale population surveys, quantitative modeling, and computational methods to examine how patterns of social connection influence outcomes such as economic opportunity, wellbeing, and aging. She is a co-author of Friends and Fortunes: Social Capital Inequality in America (Cambridge University Press, 2026), which examines how social capital is unequally distributed across the United States using more than two dozen survey datasets. Her research has also appeared in journals including Sociological Science, European Journal of Ageing, and The Prison Journal. Through her work, Feng seeks to better understand how relational structures reproduce social inequality and how social connections shape opportunities across the life course. At Vanderbilt, she is working as a postdoctoral researcher on the NIH R56-funded project “National Study of Older Never-Married Adults” (NSONMA), led by Dr. Lijun Song.