PhD Student Spotlights: Q&A with Qihao Zhan, Argentina Coy and Wei-Cheng Liu

As part of our ongoing series highlighting doctoral scholars, we’re sharing PhD students’ perspectives alongside a snapshot of their research and the ideas driving their work forward. In this installment, Qihao Zhan, Argentina Coy, and Wei-Cheng Liu reflect on what brought them to the School of Social Work, the experiences that have shaped their academic journeys, the questions guiding their inquiry, and the impact they aspire to make through their scholarship and engagement. Together, their stories illustrate the depth, rigor, and sense of purpose that define the doctoral experience and the meaningful contributions they are making to communities, policy, and practice.

Qihao Zhan

Qihao Zhan shares what drew her to the University of Illinois, where she finds focus on campus, and how her work is reshaping conversations around adolescent dating violence and intergenerational trauma in social work.

What drew you to the University of Illinois, and how has the program supported or shaped your research?

As a scholar engaged in research on adolescent dating violence, I planned to pursue my doctoral training with a faculty advisor whose work closely aligned with my interests. I was thrilled to find Dr. Rachel Garthe while searching for researchers publishing in this area on Google Scholar. My strong research alignment with Dr. Garthe initially drew me to the University of Illinois.

During my campus visit, the supportive environment within the School of Social Work solidified my decision to join the program as a PhD student. Throughout my doctoral training, I have received a tremendous amount of support from faculty, staff, and my fellow PhD students who have mentored me not only in my research but also in my professional development.

For example, while applying for the Grand Challenges for Social Work Doctoral Award, I received invaluable guidance from faculty mentors, our PhD program director, and staff from the grants and contracts team. Their encouragement and feedback were instrumental in strengthening my application materials and ultimately securing this research funding.

Where is your go-to place on campus for completing work or studying, and why?

I really appreciate having a dedicated and shared PhD student office space. I spend the majority of my time working in that space and truly enjoy being on campus, as it enhances my productivity and allows me to build connections with fellow students, staff, and faculty. I also spend time writing in the music library next to the School of Social Work, as well as in the main library when they host writing groups during the semesters and writing retreats over breaks. These structured work environments have helped me develop a clear work–life balance and consistent writing habits, which I believe are critical for a doctoral researcher.

Your research focuses on adolescent dating violence, parenting behaviors within the context of intimate partner violence, and youth violence prevention, with particular attention to the health and developmental impacts of violence exposure. What key questions are currently guiding your work, and how do you see this research contributing to the broader field of social work?

Adolescent dating violence is a significant national social problem and public health concern, affecting many adolescent populations and their overall well-being. Addressing dating and interpersonal violence is a core priority in social work. It aligns closely with two of the field’s Grand Challenges: ensuring healthy development for youth and fostering healthy relationships to end violence. Much of my work is guided by the resiliency theory. I focus on identifying promotive and protective factors related to adolescent dating violence at the individual, relationship, community, and societal levels, across the Social-Ecological Model. Using a holistic, strengths-based approach, I examine resilience processes and how they support healthy relationship development among adolescents. Ultimately, my goal is to translate my findings into evidence-informed youth prevention practices that promote healthy relationships across the lifespan.

Argentina Coy

We spoke with Argentina Coy, about what drew her to University of Illinois, where she finds focus on campus, and how her work is reshaping conversations on equity, school-based social work, and systemic racial disparities in social work.

What drew you to the University of Illinois, and how has the program supported or shaped your research?

I was drawn to the University of Illinois because of its strong interdisciplinary culture and its engagement with structural inequality. My research sits at the intersection of education systems, racial inequity, and institutional stress, and I wanted a program that would support work grounded in critical theory and systems analysis.

Having completed my MSW here before entering the PhD program, I was already familiar with the School of Social Work’s emphasis on applied scholarship. The doctoral program has challenged me to refine my conceptual frameworks, particularly around extending Critical Race Theory and Racial Battle Fatigue into analyses of prolonged parental advocacy in K–12 education.

Where is your go-to place on campus for completing work or studying, and why?

My go-to space is usually a quiet corner of the Social Work building- often my desk in the PhD student office. I’ve intentionally set up that space to support long stretches of focused thinking. It is decorated in personal ways that spark creativity and remind me why I’m doing the work, which includes books, meaningful objects, visual notes of conceptual models. It makes the space feel less transactional and more generative. Of course, some knickknacks and notes from my daughter make it feel more complete and are wonderful reminders of what is driving my education and passion.

I gravitate toward environments that allow for deep, uninterrupted thought. Much of my work involves mapping theoretical frameworks and building conceptual connections across systems, so I need both quiet and a sense of intellectual grounding. Being in a space where teaching, research, and policy conversations are happening simultaneously reinforces that the work is part of something larger. The other students in the cohort are magnificent resources of knowledge and skill, and being present in the office allows generative interdisciplinary conversations to take place.

Your research has explored areas such as Social-Emotional Learning, intimate partner violence, and racial disparities within school systems. What key questions are currently guiding your work, and how do you see this research contributing to the broader field of social work?

At the core of my research is one central question:
How do structurally marginalized families navigate prolonged institutional exposure in educational systems, and what are the cumulative psychological, social, and physiological impacts of that navigation?

More specifically, I’m examining:

• How Black parents engage in educational advocacy over time.
• How repeated school-based encounters may function as chronic institutional stress exposure.
• How frameworks like Racial Battle Fatigue can be extended beyond individual students to parents and caregivers.
• How strengths-based models, such as community cultural wealth, better capture adaptive strategies that dominant deficit narratives ignore.

Across projects (whether examining Social-Emotional Learning frameworks, intimate partner violence, or racialized school discipline), I’m interested in systems. Who is required to adapt? Who is labeled resistant? Who is protected by policy, and who is burdened by it?

I see this work contributing to social work in three major ways:

Theoretical expansion: Extending CRT and RBF into parental advocacy spaces broadens how we conceptualize institutional trauma.

Practice implications: School social workers and educators need frameworks that recognize cumulative racialized stress, not just isolated incidents

Policy relevance: If we understand prolonged advocacy as labor (emotional, cognitive, and physiological) then school engagement policies must shift from compliance models to partnership models.

Ultimately, my goal is to reposition marginalized families not as disengaged or deficient, but as strategic navigators of unequal systems. Social work, at its best, interrogates power while centering human dignity, and I hope my scholarship contributes to that tradition.

Wei-Cheng Liu

We also connected with Wei-Cheng Liu about what drew him to the University of Illinois, where he finds focus on campus, and how his work is reshaping conversations around social policy and poverty.

What drew you to the University of Illinois, and how has the program supported or shaped your research?

The University of Illinois offers an exceptional environment for doctoral training. The combination of a healthy work–life balance, affordable living costs, and extraordinarily supportive faculty and staff has been essential in sustaining focus throughout the PhD journey. The program has also provided abundant opportunities to develop my research skills—ranging from conference travel funding and stable TA/RA support to a rich selection of courses and workshops that continually expand my methodological and substantive expertise.

Where is your go-to place on campus for completing work or studying, and why?

My go-to place for work is the PhD office. Each student has an assigned workspace equipped with a computer, dual monitors, and essential office resources such as printers and stationery. Beyond the excellent facilities, the office is a vibrant intellectual space where informal discussions and small meetings often spark new research ideas and foster meaningful connections among students and faculty. Working there frequently brings unexpected moments of inspiration that enrich my academic experience.

Your research interests consist of poverty and social policy. What key questions are currently guiding your work, and how do you see this research contributing to the broader field of social work?

My research focuses on poverty and social policy, with particular attention to how welfare institutions shape economic insecurity and social stratification across the life course. One line of inquiry examines how the design and implementation of social policies structure individuals’ pathways into and out of poverty, especially amid unstable or precarious employment. I am also interested in how different welfare regimes and policy instruments distribute protection across social groups, with a focus on families with children and low-wage workers. Through this work, I aim to advance a dynamic and institutional understanding of poverty, which moves beyond individual-level explanations and highlights policy design as a central driver of inequality. Ultimately, I hope to bridge policy analysis and social work practice by producing evidence that helps practitioners, advocates, and policymakers craft social policies that more effectively reduce poverty while promoting dignity, stability, and equity.