Hua-Yu Sebastian Cherng is a sociologist whose scholarly and community-based work focuses on the social lives of marginalized youth. His interests include comparative perspectives on race/ethnicity and migration (with a focus on China and the US) and social capital within the school and educational context.

As such, his research examines the social relationships in the lives of minority and immigrant adolescents in the US, gender, ethnic, and migrant differences in education in China, and cultural and social capital transfers between adolescents in the US. His scholarship has appeared in journals such as American Educational Research Journal, Social Forces, and Teachers College Record.

Cherng received his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania in 2014, and he has also taught in a charter middle school in San Francisco and a college in Anhui, China.