Ming Wen joined the University of Hong Kong in the Fall of 2022 as the Dean of Social Sciences. She started her academic career at the University of Utah in 2003, where she rose through the academic ranks to full professorship in 2013 and chaired the Department of Sociology from 2015 to 2021.

Wen is a population scholar studying the social determinants of health and human development across the life course, with broad training in sociology, epidemiology, and statistics. Her US-based studies have examined the place and family effects on various health and lifestyle outcomes across the life course. Her recent China-based work focuses on how family rural-to-urban migration plays a role in child developmental outcomes and how living arrangements and socio-relational characteristics affect health and well-being among middle-aged and older adults. She has recently received a large collaborative grant from the Research Grants Council (Hong Kong) (RGC) to study early childhood development in Hong Kong using survey, direct assessment, and intervention methods. Wen has published prolifically on social contexts of population outcomes in top-specialty or top-generalist journals such as Demography, Social Forces, Social Science & Medicine, Journal of Gerontology, Child Development, Milbank Quarterly, Social Science & Research, and American Journal of Public Health. Her research has been widely cited and generously funded by the NIH (USA), the RGC (HK), and various private foundations.