People
Faculty
Zixi Chen (陳梓曦) is an Assistant Professor of Practice in Computational Social Science at NYU Shanghai, affiliated with the Center for Applied Social and Economic Research (CASER). She is passionate about fostering interdisciplinary collaboration to address societal challenges through computational methods. Trained as a methodologist, her research integrates text-as-data approaches, social network analysis, and quantitative methods to examine human behavior in technology-mediated education and social contexts. She is also dedicated to developing big-and-rich data frameworks that combines the advantages of digital big data and design-based survey data to advance equity in data-driven social science research. Her work has been published in leading journals such as the American Journal of Education and the Journal of Research on Technology in Education.
Jia Miao is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at NYU Shanghai. Her research examines the impact of urbanization, urban redevelopment, and neighborhoods on social cohesion, health inequality, and subjective well-being in Asia. She also explores the social consequences of homeownership in major Chinese cities using experimental designs. Additionally, she studies the interplay between family and neighborhood dynamics in shaping the well-being of older adults amid rapid population aging in Chinese societies. Her work has been published in Social Forces, Chinese Sociological Review, Social Science & Medicine, Health & Places, Cities, and other journals.
Dr. Yongjun Zhang is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and the Institute for Advanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University. He is also affiliated with the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies, the AI Innovation Institute, and the Center for Changing Systems of Power.
As a computational social scientist, Dr. Zhang leverages large-scale data, natural language processing, and computer vision to investigate social, political, and organizational behavior, focusing on topics such as racial segregation, political polarization, and organizational inequality.
His research has been published in leading journals, including American Journal of Sociology, Demography, Scientific Reports, and Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. He is also the co-editor of Computational Social Science: Applications in China Studies and serves on the editorial boards of several journals, including Nature Scientific Data, Journal of Mathematical Sociology, Socius, Social Science Computer Review, and The Sociological Quarterly.
Speakers
Yang Chen is a Professor within the College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at Fudan University, and leads the Big Data and Networking (DataNET) group at Fudan. From April 2011 to September 2014, he was a postdoctoral associate at the Department of Computer Science, Duke University, USA, where he served as Senior Personnel in the NSF Mobility First project. From September 2009 to April 2011, he has been a research associate and the deputy head of Computer Networks Group, Institute of Computer Science, University of Goettingen, Germany. He received his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University in 2004 and 2009, respectively. He visited Stanford University (in 2007) and Microsoft Research Asia (2006-2008) as a visiting student. He was a Nokia Visiting Professor at Aalto University in 2019. His research interests include online social networks, Internet architecture and urban computing. He serves as a Senior Associate Editor of the ACM Transactions on Social Computing, an Associate Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Social Computing, and an Editorial Board Member of Elsevier Computer Communications. He served as a OC / SPC / PC Member for many international conferences, including SOSP, SIGCOMM, WWW, IMC, IJCAI, AAAI, ECAI, DASFAA, IWQoS, ICCCN, GLOBECOM and ICC. He is a senior member of ACM/IEEE, and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
Dr. Jiang primarily studies inequality in the labor market, with particular attention to often-overlooked but increasingly important dimensions of social stratification, including cultural and moral framing, scheduling practices, and physical space—examining how work is organized, distributed, and segregated across micro-level interactions, meso-level workplaces, and macro-level geographies.
Dr. Jiang is broadly interested in developing new sociological data and methodologies to engage classic debates and generate new perspectives, particularly through the use of large-scale textual and visual data, alongside computational and causal inferential methods.
Dr. Jiang’s previous research has been published or is forthcoming in American Sociological Review. It has won awards from the Economic Sociology Section of American Sociological Association and RC28 of the International Sociological Association.
Guoer Liu is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California San Diego. She is affiliated with UCSD’s 21st Century China Center and the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science and Scientific Computing from the University of Michigan in 2024. Her research sits at the intersection of political institutions, technology, and environmental politics, with a primary empirical focus on China. Her book project asks why governments turn to automation when it constrains the very discretion that makes political power useful. She also conducts research in political methodology, with a focus on causal inference and survey experiments.
Hua Shen is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at NYU Shanghai, jointly affiliated with New York University. Her research lies at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction and multiple AI fields, including Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing, and Machine Learning. Particularly, she led a team to initiate research on Bidirectional Human-AI Alignment, aiming to empower humans to interactively explain, evaluate, and collaborate with AI, while incorporating human feedback and values to improve AI systems. She has been selected for the 2026 Google Gemini Academic Program Award, four Shanghai Talent Award programs, and the 2023 Rising Stars of Data Science. Her papers have received multiple honors, including the CHI 2026 Best Paper Honorable Mention Award, EMNLP 2025 Outstanding Paper Award, Best Paper Award at AIED 2024, Best Demo Award at CSCW 2023, Best Paper Honorable Mention at IUI 2023, and a Google Research Science Conference Scholarship (2023). She received her Ph.D. from The Pennsylvania State University and was previously a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Washington and the University of Michigan.
Xi Song is a Professor of Sociology and a faculty member of the Asian American Initiative at Columbia University. Prior to joining Columbia, she was the Schiffman Family Presidential Professor of Sociology and a faculty member of the Graduate Group in Demography at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include social mobility, occupations and work, Asian Americans, population studies, and quantitative methodology. Song received the 2021 William Julius Wilson Early Career Award from the American Sociological Association. Her publications received multiple awards from the American Sociological Association (ASA), the International Sociological Association Research Committee on Social Stratification and Mobility (ISA-RC28), the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS), and Demographic Research. She received the Mentor of the Year Award from the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania in 2022. She has served on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Sociology, Demography, Sociological Methodology, Social Science Research, and Research in Social Stratification and Mobility.
Teaching Assistants
Minghong Shen is a Postdoctoral Fellow at New York University Shanghai. Starting in Sep 2026, he will join the Population Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania as a Postdoctoral Researcher. His research broadly concerns early childhood development, family demography, urban studies, and computational social science. He received his PhD from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2025.
Participants
Tongzhou Liu