Dr. Chi-Fang Wu is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). She received her master’s degree in social work from National Taiwan University and her Ph.D. in social work from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Previously, she worked as a policy planner and evaluator at Research, Development, and Evaluation Commission, Executive Yuan or Cabinet in Taiwan. Moreover, she worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison prior to joining the School of Social Work at UIUC.

Dr. Wu’s practice and research areas focus on poverty, gender inequalities, social welfare policy, and program evaluation. Her interest is in assessing the effectiveness of different strategies for promoting economic advancement among women. Her research has made contributions in identifying the dynamics and effects of welfare reform, and in understanding whether and how public and private assistance helps low-income families meet their basic needs. She has extensive experience analyzing complex, longitudinal, state administrative data and national, population-based data.

Her current research investigates the effects of unemployment and underemployment on the well-being of both single-mother and two-parent families, and determines whether and how the coping resources and strategies used by these families mediate and/or moderate relationships between employment problems and family well-being. Furthermore, she collaborates with faculty and students from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UIUC. They have been investigating social-cultural barriers hinders the use of water treatment projects in Guatemala and evaluating its health impacts on the residents.