Q+A: Qirui Ju
Research Associate with the Duke Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity
Qirui Ju joined the Cook Center in 2022 as a Research Assistant, working with founding director Dr. William A. “Sandy” Darity Jr. and other senior researchers. Upon graduating from his master’s program at Duke, he continued with the Cook Center as a research associate, working on research projects on economic inequality. He has published papers on inequality in various spaces, from healthcare to AI to academia. He received the Jerome M. Clubb Scholarship from the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), as well as a grant from Duke Innovation Co-lab for his research on AI and learning outcomes.
In this Q&A with Cook Center research associates Rachel Ruff and Lucas Hubbard, Qirui shares his research interests and experiences.
What aspects of your personal background and academic journey led you to focus on inequality?
I guess it really comes from my personal background. I’m from China and the country has a lot of inequality in terms of economic development. I come from the southwest region, which is a relatively underdeveloped part of China. So this made me quite interested in inequality topics. I decided to study in the United States for my undergraduate degree at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I received my Bachelor of Arts in economics and history, and I minored in math. I continued my studies at Duke, where I got my master of arts degree in economics. As I graduated from Duke, I was originally interested in economic growth. However, economic growth focuses more on economy. And I was more drawn to a human side, which is about inequality. So, I started working with Professor Darity in 2022 as his research assistant.
I was also doing a research project on academia in China. At that moment there was a literature gap on addressing gender inequality in China, specifically in the economic faculty positions. So my journey into inequality started after I completed my degrees and through my own research projects.
How did studying both economics and history shape your research interests?
I guess both history and economics are two drastically different disciplines, but both discussed a lot of interesting topics. For example, I remember this one class called “History of Capitalism” where we talked about the colonization of India, Jamaica, and Cuba. These topics mirrored my interests in economic growth theory, which is about how underperforming countries showed rapid economic growth after fighting for their independence. To me, this is a way economics and history relate to each other.
What is a common thread that ties your work together?
I’ll probably say inequality. The paper I did in 2022 about health was from a capstone course in graduate school. It examines how health impacted economic growth in developing countries post-1990. At this time I was still mostly interested in economic growth, but I started focusing more on inequality in my other publications. Another aspect to the AI paper in 2023 was that people’s reading comprehension skills changed the impact of AI. I found that, generally, people with better reading and comprehension skills tended to perform better, even under the influence of AI. And the most recent paper in 2024 is about addressing the inequality in academia.
Your paper on the negative impact of generative AI on learning outcomes is particularly relevant today. Based on your findings, what policy recommendations would you suggest to mitigate these effects?
In my experiment, the overall finding was negative and that when people start to use AI, their scores and understanding of the material becomes lower. This was an early paper in the field as there were no other papers answering this question the moment I posted it. But now there are more researchers doing a similar thing on a larger scale, I think at UPenn. They recruited about 1000 students and got similar results to the impact of using AI.
For that paper, I would say that more human intervention is important. For example, instructors being clear about their AI policy in the beginning of class and guiding students to help them not rely on AI as much.
What were your key findings in your research on professorship inequality in Chinese academia/the Chinese academic system?
My research addressed three dimensions of inequality: gender, party affiliation, and international experience. The most significant dimension that translated to ascending to a full professorship was people with an international degree. The next highest [predictor] was gender, the last was party affiliation.
One of the things I think is different for Chinese academia compared to the United States, is that they stress a lot on the international experiences. From the overall regression analysis I found that for some people who got their degrees abroad, or outside of mainland China, they definitely enjoy a certain level of privileges compared to those who never study abroad. There is also a gender gap in the current promotion status in China, similar to what we see in the United States. The difference is that maybe there is not enough support or effort to address those inequities in China, because this topic has not been widely discussed in China.
One of the policies I would suggest to reduce inequalities in abroad experiences is an independent or government funding process, to help as many Chinese faculty members as possible study abroad.
Securing funding is often a major hurdle for early-career researchers. Based on your experience receiving grants and scholarships, what strategies do you recommend for aligning research with funding opportunities?
I would say the best way is to make sure your work aligns with the organization you are interested in. I’ve seen people spending all of their time trying to apply to as many funding opportunities as possible, but I don’t think that’s a good strategy. Another way to think about this is to tailor your statement, or proposal. When you are applying for a grant, you should be aware that every organization has their own agenda or focus on what type of research they are interested in. So it’s quite important to make sure that your proposed work aligns with theirs.
As a volunteer peer reviewer, what are some common mistakes you’ve noticed in research proposals, and how has that experience influenced how you approach your own work?
One of the things that I did learn from those experiences is that it’s really important to be clear and indicate the potential influence of your projects. Whenever a proposal mentions something like the potential impacts, it’s very important to cite the relevant goal. For example, “This new project is intended to help [blank] grow by XYZ percent.” It is so important to communicate that number and show how you got that number because they want to see the scale of your proposal. Some people fail at this stage because they might say, “This project will have a large sample and large impact.” However, that’s pretty vague; the reviewers want to see how large it is exactly, how did you determine the impact, etc. So that perspective is very important and has been very helpful even as I navigate my own projects.
Can you tell us about your current projects at the Cook Center and your role in them?
I’m currently working with Professor Darity on a project about inequality on a global scale. We will start from an economic comparison across different countries, and then go deeper to intergroup comparisons. My job mainly involves drafting part of those papers and leading the quantitative analysis.
If you could collaborate with any researcher or institution on a dream project, what would it be and why?
I would probably like to work on something related to Black businesses and addressing racial inequality. The Center has quite a large scale of research on Black businesses in North Carolina, so I would love an opportunity to work on a project like that in the future.
Are there any books or research papers that have significantly influenced your approach to studying inequality?
Sure. I think Professor Darity has multiple papers talking about Stratification Economics, which is about how people from different races receive different levels of inequality. I definitely recommend that to people who are new to this field, as well as his other projects in economics.
Also seeing the Cook Center’s previous work, on Black businesses in North Carolina, Black Wall Street of the South: From Reconstruction to the Pandemic. That’s an interesting one to look at because we currently do not have a lot of research in this field. It’s definitely an interesting area to learn more about.
