People
Faculty
Xiaogang Wu is Yufeng Global Professor of Social Science, the founding Director of the Center for Applied Social and Economic Research (CASER) at NYU Shanghai, and Professor of Sociology at New York University. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from UCLA and has taught in the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology for 17 years before he joined NYU Shanghai in 2020. One of the CASER’s focal areas of research is computational social science. His own research interests include social stratification and mobility, education, urban sociology, survey and quantitative methods.
Yongjun Zhang is an Assistant Professor of sociology and institute for advanced computational science at Stony Brook University. Dr. Zhang’s work combines statistical, network, and computational methods with big data to study social, political, and organizational behavior in the US and the globe. His current projects focus mainly on understanding human mobility, segregation, and polarization using near-population voter and consumer records, social media texts and images, and large-scale GPS data. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Arizona.
Yongren Shi is an Assistant Professor of sociology at the University of Iowa. The foundation of his research is the sociological study of human behavior and group dynamics with an focus on social and cultural processes of polarization. He extensively uses large-scale digital trace data and a range of computational methods, including network analyses, computational textual analyses, agent-based models, machine learning, and online experiments. He was a post-doctoral research associate at the Yale Institute for Network Science after receiving my Ph.D. in sociology from Cornell University.
Speakers
Bart Bonikowski is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Politics at New York University and a Faculty Affiliate at NYU’s Center for Data Science. Relying on survey methods, computational text analysis, and experimental research, his work applies insights from cultural sociology to the study of politics in the United States and Europe, with a particular focus on nationalism, populism, and the rise of the radical right.
Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, PhD, MPH, is a social scientist and physician at Yale University who conducts research in the fields of network science, biosocial science, and behavior genetics. His current work focuses on how human biology and health affect, and are affected by, social interactions and social networks. He directs the Human Nature Lab and is the Co-Director of the Yale Institute for Network Science. He is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University, appointed in the Departments of Sociology; Medicine; Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; Biomedical Engineering; and the School of Management.
Esteban Moro is a Reseach Scientist in Connection Science, an associate professor at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid in Spain, and a member of the Joint Institute UC3M Santander on Financial Big Data. He researches the intersection of big data and computational social science with special attention to human dynamics, collective intelligence, social networks, and urban mobility in problems like viral marketing, natural disaster management, and economic segregation in cities. His work has been featured in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal.
Laura Nelson is an Assistant Professor at University of British Columbia who uses computational methods – principally text analysis, natural language processing, machine learning, and network analysis techniques – to study social movements, culture, gender, and organizations and institutions. She has developed and taught courses introducing social science and humanities students to computational methods and the scripting languages Python and R, data science courses, and graduate-level sociological theory. She is currently a co-PI on a million-dollar grant through the National Science Foundation to study the spread of gender-equity ideas related to STEM fields through higher education networks, primarily in the United States.
Minsu Park is an Assistant Professor of Social Research and Public Policy at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) and an Affiliate Faculty at the Center for Data Science at New York University (NYU). He works in computational social science with a specialization in the consumption of culture, production of creative work, and social networks. His current research focuses on how informational and normative cues interact with an individual’s preference to make a certain decision and how cultural preferences change over time—individually and globally. His research inhabits an interdisciplinary nexus between data science and social science, simultaneously drawing on and contributing to both. His work has been published in top-tier computer and information science conferences (e.g., ICWSM) and interdisciplinary journals (e.g., Nature Human Behaviour).
Han Zhang is an Assistant Professor in Division of Social Science, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). His research spans computational social science, social movements, social networks, and quantitative methods. His current projects focus on protests in China and global surveillance and its social impact.
Teaching Assistants
Zhi Li is a PhD student in the Center for Applied Social and Economic Research (CASER) at NYU Shanghai and in the Department of Sociology at New York University. His research focuses on social inequality, networks and organizations, life course, and computational social science. He tries to analyze how social networks and organizations can shape social inequality across people’s life course and during social changes. His work has appeared in International Journal for Equity in Health, Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, and Social Indicators Research.
Conor McCutcheon is a PhD student at the Center for Applied Social and Economic Research (CASER) at NYU Shanghai and the Department of Sociology at NYU. His research interests include social stratification, educational inequality, and social networks. His work focuses on the impact rapid economic development can have on social structure, particularly elite formation.
Participants
Hong Chen
Hong Chen is a PhD student at the School of Information at University of Michigan. He studies science of science and innovation and he is currently working on how scientists cite, collaborate, and navigate publishing landscape. He is also interested in science communication, information diffusion and large language models.
Jia Chen
Dr. Jia Chen got her PhD degree from University of Hong Kong. She is currently an Associate Professor at Department of Social Work, Shanghai University. Her study interest includes intergenerational relationship, family care and medical and family social work.
Xi Cheng
Xi Cheng is a sociology Ph.D. student at Northwestern University. She earned her master’s degree in computational social science from the University of Chicago and holds dual bachelor’s degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Missouri and Beijing Jiaotong University. Cheng’s research lies in the intersection of computational methods, culture, education, social theories, stratification and social mobility, and urban sociology.
Esol Cho
Esol Cho is a lecturer in the Department of International Studies at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. She received her PhD in Political Science at the State University of New York at Binghamton in 2022. Her research concerns the influence of domestic political and economic considerations on foreign aid choices using computational methods.
Lin Qi
Lin Qi is a Ph.D. student in the Crawford School of Public Policy at Australian National University. His research interests broadly center around financial contagion, financial liquidity, commodity market, and financial literacy. He earned B.A. in international economics and trade from Nankai University and M.S. in financial and econometrics from Queen Mary, University of London.
Marco Laghi
Marco Laghi is a PhD student at the Center for Applied Social and Economic Research (CASER) at NYU Shanghai and the Department of Sociology at NYU. His research involves education, population health and development, and stratification.
Lizhen Liang
Lizhen Liang is a doctoral student at Syracuse University, School of Information Studies. His research interest includes computational social science, science of science, natural language processing, and ethics in AI.
Yang Lu
Yang Lu is a Data Analyst – Social Science Research at Brandeis University and for the diversitydatakids.org project. Utilizing a wide range of computational tools, Yang works on the indicator development and pipeline maintenance of Child Opportunity Index, a metric that maps the quality of resources for children, and sparks conversations about unequal access to opportunity and to spur actions to increase equity. Yang earned his Master’s in Education Policy and Analysis from Harvard University and Bachelor’s in Economics and Urban Studies from McGill University. Before graduate school, he was a Dean’s Fellow of New Students and Diversity at the Office of Student Life of NYU Shanghai.
Zheng Ma
Zheng Ma is a PhD student in Social Policy and Government at Harvard Kennedy School. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Wisconsin Madison and a Master’s degree at the University of Chicago, where he focused on Political Economy, Macroeconomics, and computational tools.
Lingbo Tong
Lingbo Tong is a Ph.D. student in the joint program of Psychology and Computer Science at the University of Notre Dame. Her research centers on building interpretable, human-centered AI in the areas of psychology and education. She is currently working on developing language models that offer mental health support to the public. She is also interested in enhancing structural equation models with deep learning techniques. Previously, she received her bachelor’s degree in Computer Science at Sichuan University.
Qi Wang
Qi is a Research Assistant Professor at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. She obtained a PhD degree from the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests span spirituality and religious studies, mindfulness, and psychological well-being. She uses topic modeling and textual analysis to examine participants’ daily mystical experiences and the higher level of human consciousness.
Hao Wang
Hao is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Government and Public Administration at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He passed his oral defense on May 31, 2023 and will be joining the City University of Hong Kong as a postdoctoral researcher, starting in August 2023. His research interests encompass contentious politics, digital petition channels, elite politics, computational social science, and survival analysis.
Huan Wang
Huan Wang is a PhD student in Psychology at Stanford University. He is broadly interested in cultural variations of emotion and decision making, and their underlying neural mechanisms. His recently work examines neural predictors of interpersonal trust and how they vary across cultural context. Prior to Stanford, he worked at UCLA and UC Davis. He received his bachelor degree at Simon Fraser University in Canada.
Junliang Xu
Junliang Xu is a master student in East Asian Studies at Stanford University. His research focuses on political sociology, conflict, and mixed methods. He is currently working on the mobilization process of the Cultural Revolution. Previously, he studied institutional changes under drastic rebellion in the late Qing Dynasty using longitudinal models. He holds BFA and LLB from Tsinghua University.
Wei Yang
Wei is a master student in Information Science at Cornell University, her research interest includes demography, spatial inequality and urban data science. She earned bachelor’s degrees in HCI and Sociology from University of Washington.
Shuangshuang Yang
Shuangshuang Yang is a PhD student in Sociology at Boston College. Her main research interests include gender, family, the life course, and health. Her current project focuses on the spillover effects of sibling disability. She is also interested in applying text and image analysis to explore online dating patterns.
Xiaohan Yin
Xiaohan is now a PhD student at the University of Hong Kong. She also got her LLM degree at HKU with full scholarship after finishing LLB from China University of Political Science and Law. Her research interests lie in the law and technology, legal professions and empirical studies of law.
Enshuai Yu
Enshuai Yu is a Ph.D. student in accounting at Carroll School of Management, Boston College. He earned a master’s degree in finance from Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance, Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2021, and bachelor’s degrees in accounting and psychology (dual degree) from Peking University in 2019. His research interests lie in the intersection of archival financial accounting and taxation, covering topics like regulation and enforcement, tax, corporate governance, and information disclosure.
Nuo Yuan
Nuo Yuan’s research interest spans both the methodological and substantive aspects of computational social science. Methodologically, he is interested in topics such as sequential experimental design and causal inference in networks. Substantively, he has been working on projects related to sustainability and inclusivity at the corporate and supply chain levels.
Yiwen Zeng
Yiwen Zeng is an incoming PhD student in Sociology at the University of Arizona. Prior to that, she completed her master’s degree at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and bachelor’s degree at Peking University. Basically, Yiwen’s research interest lies in understanding the social and organizational process of evaluation, especially in the labor market, and the sociological foundation of workplace inequality. Particularly, she is interested in investigating to what extent the ideal of meritocracy can be fulfilled in evaluation, and whether and how non-meritocratic elements could be blended in given specific institutional settings. Methodologically, she intends to deploy experimental study, audit study and text analysis to examine the questions above.
Mengqi Zhan
Mengqi Zhan is an Assistant Professor of Communication at University of Texas at Arlington. She received her PhD from the Department of Communication at University of Maryland College Park. As an organizational communication researcher, she primarily studies the communicative processes that occur within and around organizations, including employee communication and corporate communication on social media. She is currently developing a new research stream that examines employee communication on anonymous social media platforms.
Shiyi Zhang
Shiyi Zhang is a PhD student in Media and Communication at University of Leicester. He is broadly interested in health communication, misinformation, social media and computational social science. His current PhD project analyses factors associated with individuals’ acceptance of mental health misinformation on social media.
Haowen Zheng
Haowen Zheng is a PhD student in sociology at Cornell University. Using quantitative and computational methods, her research projects center around social stratification and mobility, demography, spatial inequality, and gender inequality in the labor market.
Yichun Zhou
Yichun Zhou is a doctoral student in Urban Systems at New York University and the Shanghai Key Laboratory of Urban Design and Urban Science (LOUD). His research interests include urban data science, social sensing, and green infrastructure. He applies novel research methods to explore the social inequality, and potential recategorizing of urban parks.