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  4. Jiaying Liu

I Am a Researcher

Jiaying LiuJiaying Liu Profile

Pronouns: she/her

Major: Undeclared

College: Sixth

UC San Diego graduation year: 2029

Which research programs/experiences have you been a part of? 

  • Triton Research and Experiential Learning Scholarship (TRELS) — awarded twice, Winter 2026 and Spring 2026
  • Undergraduate Research Conference (URC) — 2026
  • Conference for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) — Winter 2026
  • Mentored Undergraduate Research and Applied Learning Symposium (MURALS) — 2026

What is your research about?

My research looks at how food assistance is actually distributed and experienced on the ground, based on fieldwork at a local NGO. Drawing on anthropological theory, particularly James Ferguson's idea of the "anti-politics machine," I examine how food banks tend to frame hunger as a logistical or charitable problem to be managed efficiently, and what gets obscured when something deeply political, like poverty and food insecurity, gets reframed as a question of distribution and metrics. I pair ethnographic observation at distribution sites with attention to the systems organizations use to measure their own impact.

Why and how did you decide to get involved in undergraduate research?

I started out volunteering at a local NGO, and I kept noticing a gap between what I saw at the distribution sites and the way the work tends to get described, in pounds of food and people served. I have a fairly quantitative background, but I wanted to sit with the harder questions that numbers alone don't answer. Working with Professor Saiba Varma in Anthropology gave me a way to turn that curiosity into a real project, and applying for TRELS let me commit to it seriously.

What has been the most exciting/interesting thing you've discovered through your research?

The parts of food distribution that look most neutral and technical, like the logistics, the eligibility rules, and the impact metrics, are often where the most quietly political decisions get made. When hunger gets framed as a problem to be "solved" efficiently, the structural causes can end up going untouched. Watching how that played out inside a real organization, alongside people who genuinely care, was a lot more complicated and more interesting than I expected.

What did you gain from this program/experience?

I came away with a real grounding in ethnographic methods, plus the experience of taking a project from a vague question all the way to presenting it publicly. More than any single skill, I think I learned to be comfortable with complexity, to resist tidy conclusions and let the fieldwork reshape my questions. The mentorship was a big part of that, and presenting at the conferences pushed me to explain my work to people outside my field.

What advice would you give to students starting research?

Start before you feel "ready." You learn the craft by doing it, not by waiting until you've read enough. Email the professor whose work interests you even if it feels intimidating, because most of them are genuinely glad to hear from undergrads. And pick something you actually care about, since research is slow and iterative, and curiosity is what carries you through the parts that aren't glamorous.

What are your future plans?

I'm continuing my studies with a focus on economics and applied mathematics, and I want to keep bringing quantitative tools together with questions about how institutions and societies actually shape people's lives. The habit I built through this research, moving back and forth between numbers and human context, is something I plan to carry into whatever comes next.

Anything else you want to share?

I'm grateful to Professor Varma and to everyone at the organization who let me into their work.