Hi! I'm Jihye Baek, a PhD Candidate in Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis. 

Some of the most profound forms of suffering are invisible; an experience of feeling disconnected from the people and places around you. I encountered this not as a clinical variable, but as something structural: shaped by where people live, who their neighbors are, and what resources surround them. That observation, grounded in my years of practice as a social worker conducting home visits and coordinating care for older adults, is what brought me to research and continues to anchor everything I do. I study the structural determinants of social isolation and loneliness in later life.

I examine social isolation and loneliness among older adults through a systems perspective: how individual circumstances, community environments, and macro-level structures interact to shape social connection. Within that framework, my work focuses on housing and neighborhood contexts as particularly consequential, yet understudied, determinants of belonging in later life. At the individual level, I have explored how age differences and social network patterns shape loneliness. At the community level, my work asks whether neighborhood social cohesion buffers loneliness, how senior housing models create and sustain communities, and how to design a participatory community-based senior housing (under review). At the macro level, I have examined how material, health, and social vulnerability are related to loneliness across countries.

My dissertation, "A Place-Based Examination of Social Isolation and Loneliness in Later Life," is the fullest expression of this agenda. Across three studies using national longitudinal data, I compare isolation and loneliness across housing types, examine service environment profiles in senior housing, and investigate how neighborhood social cohesion and loneliness influence each other over time. My goal is not only to describe disparities but to generate evidence that can inform where and how we build environments that sustain social connection.