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.