Xi Song (宋曦) is Professor of Sociology and a faculty member of the Asian American Initiative at Columbia University. Her research examines how social and economic change shapes inequality and opportunities for mobility across careers and generations. Her current work focuses on artificial intelligence and the future of work, as well as the historical and contemporary experiences of Asian Americans.

Song received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California—Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2015, with the dissertation "Social Stratification in Multiple Generations." Before that, she completed her Master of Sciences in Statistics at UCLA in 2013, Master of Philosophy in Social Sciences at HKUST in 2010, and Bachelor of Arts with the Highest Academic Honors ​at Renmin University of China in 2008.

Through her work with the Occupation Lab, Song studies how artificial intelligence and occupational restructuring are changing workers’ career opportunities. She examines how occupations grow, decline, and evolve, and how workers navigate these changes through shifts in jobs, employers, and skills. A central question is whether workers in declining occupations can move into expanding fields—and who faces barriers to doing so. She also develops applications of large language models for social science research, including tools for occupational coding and measuring workers’ exposure to AI.

Song’s research on Asian Americans connects historical patterns of mobility with contemporary inequalities. Using linked historical census records, she investigates when Asian Americans’ educational and occupational mobility advantages emerged and whether these changes coincided with the popularization of the “model minority” narrative. This work traces mobility across generations and examines how racial exclusion shaped the relationship between educational attainment and occupational opportunity.

Her contemporary research examines Asian Americans’ earnings and career trajectories using longitudinal surveys and linked administrative records. She investigates how educational credentials, occupational sorting, and workplace characteristics shape earnings over the life course, and where barriers associated with the “bamboo ceiling” persist. This research emphasizes differences within the Asian American population by gender, national origin, immigrant generation, and place of education, while also comparing Asian Americans’ experiences with those of other racial and ethnic groups. Together, these projects explain how economic advantages in some domains can coexist with persistent barriers in others.

Across these areas, Song combines demographic and statistical methods with computational approaches to study inequality. Her broader research examines how advantages and disadvantages persist across multiple generations and develops methods for analyzing mobility, kinship, and population change.

Song received the 2021 William Julius Wilson Early Career Award from the American Sociological Association. She was elected to the Sociological Research Association (SRA) in 2025. Her publications received multiple awards from the American Sociological Association (ASA), the International Sociological Association Research Committee on Social Stratification and Mobility (ISA-RC28), the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS), and the Demographic Research. She received the Mentor of the Year Award from the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania in 2022. She has served on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Sociology, Demography, Sociological Methodology, Social Science Research, and Research in Social Stratification and Mobility.