Yao Lu is a professor of sociology at Columbia University and faculty affiliate of the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, the Columbia Population Research Center, and the Data Science Institute at Columbia University. Her research lies at the intersection of inequality, demography, and politics, with a primary focus on racial/ethnic and gender inequality in high-skill labor markets and the impact of immigration on socioeconomic inequality in sending and receiving societies. Her work takes a multidisciplinary approach and draws on a range of quantitative and computational methods. She has conducted two national surveys with her collaborators, including a 2020 survey experiment that investigates how the COVID-19 pandemic has shaped racial attitudes and relations in the United States. Lu received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles and her B.S. in statistics from Fudan University.