Jihye Baek

 Jihye Baek is a PhD candidate in Social Work at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research examines how housing, neighborhood, and service environments shape social isolation and loneliness in later life. She treats social disconnection not as an individual outcome, but as a condition structured by place.

Jihye earned her B.A. in Social Welfare from Sungkyunkwan University before completing her MSW at Washington University in St. Louis in 2019. She came to research through practice. She coordinated data collection across subsidized senior housing facilities, and later worked as a social worker in St. Louis and Seoul, South Korea. In these roles, she conducted in-home assessments and coordinated social and health services for frail older adults. This experience taught her to see social disconnection as a structural issue shaped by where people live and what surrounds them. Consequently, place became her central analytic lens.

Her dissertation, A Place-Based Examination of Social Isolation and Loneliness in Later Life, draws on a nationally representative panel dataset (National Health & Aging Trends Study). It examines how residential contexts shape social disconnection across three layers: housing type, service environments within senior housing, and the neighborhood social environment. Her broader interests include protective and risk factors for social outcomes among vulnerable older populations, including solo agers and minority older adults. Further, she is interested in community-based approaches that strengthen social connection in later life, and in how these approaches relate to older adults’ long-term social and health outcomes.