People
Faculty
Kat Albrecht
Kat Albrecht is a JD/PhD Candidate in Sociology at Northwestern University, a Law and Science Fellow at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, and a Global Impacts Fellow at the Buffett Institute. She will be moving to Atlanta in early August to begin a position as an Assistant Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University. Kat’s work sits at the intersection of computational social science and law, where she uses innovative computational techniques to study fear, violence, and data surveillance. Her work has been published in outlets like Law & Policy, Nature Human Behavior, and Law, Technology & Humans. This is her 4th year organizing SICSS Chicago and she is 2017 SICSS Alum.
Carrie Stallings
Carrie Stallings is a doctoral student at Northwestern University and a Native and Indigenous Studies fellow. Her research interests include inequality, race & ethnicity, and computational and decolonial methodologies. Her current research focuses on inequality, particularly on the roles that government and educational institutions play in the life outcomes of Black and Indigenous peoples.
Yian Yin
Yian Yin is a Ph.D. candidate of Industrial Engineering & Management Sciences at Northwestern University. He also holds affiliations with Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems and Center for Science of Science and Innovation. Yian studies computational social science, with a particular focus on integrating theoretical insights in innovation studies, computational tools in data science, and modeling frameworks in complex systems to examine various fundamental elements of innovation lifecycles. His research has been published in multidisciplinary journals including Science, Nature, Nature Human Behaviour, and Nature Reviews Physics. Yian is also a 2018 SICSS alum.Speakers
James Evans
James Evans is a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago. He is the director of the Knowledge Lab and the founder/director of the Computational Social Science program at UChicago. His research focuses on the collective system of thinking and knowing, ranging from the distribution of attention and intuition, the origin of ideas and shared habits of reasoning to processes of agreement (and dispute), accumulation of certainty (and doubt), and the texture—novelty, ambiguity, topology—of understanding. You can find his work in Nature, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review and other outlets.
Dashun Wang
Dashun Wang is a professor of Management and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management and McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University. He is the founding director of the Center for Science of Science and Innovation (CSSI) and a core member of the Northwestern Institute in Complex Systems (NICO). His current research focus is on Science of Science, a quest to turn the scientific methods and curiosities upon ourselves, hoping to use and develop tools from complexity sciences and artificial intelligence to broadly explore the opportunities for innovation and promises of prosperity offered by the recent data explosion in science. Dashun is a recipient of the AFOSR Young Investigator award (2016) and Poets & Quants Best 40 Under 40 Professors (2019).
Abigail Z. Jacobs
Abigail Z. Jacobs in a computational social scientist and an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan in the School of Information and the Center for the Study of Complex Systems. She is also an affiliate of the Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing (ESC) and the Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS). Her research focuses on structure, governance, and inequality in sociotechnical systems; measurement; and social networks. Her work has appeared in outlets like Management Science, the Journal of Complex Networks, and Physical Review.
Adam Pah
Adam Pah is a Clinical Assistant Professor at the Kellogg School of Management and Organizations at Northwestern University. He received his BS from Arizona State University, PhD from Northwestern University, and has worked industrially as a Data Scientist. He is a Co-Principal Investigator of the Systematic Content Analysis of Litigation EventS Open Knowledge Network (SCALES OKN), a NSF funded effort to transform the transparency and accessibility of court records. The SCALES OKN is a public platform that uses AI to surface insights into systematic patterns and behaviors in court records. The project's goal is to make it easy for lawyers, legal scholars, and journalists to transform difficult question about how the courts operate into easily obtainable information and answers. His primary research for the platform centers on building language models to understand how litigation proceeds, disambiguating entities, and quantifying the extent that legal outcomes vary within and between court districts.
Kristina Lerman
Kristina Lerman is a Project Leader at the Information Sciences Institute, a unit of the University of Southern California (USC), and a Research Associate Professor in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering's Computer Science Department. An expert in complex multi-agent systems, Dr. Lerman has received numerous grants on social data and other topics from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Information Sciences Institute (ISI) early in her career. Her current work revolves around deciphering the structure and dynamics of social web sites such as Twitter, Digg, Flickr and Delicious. Among her goals: automatically organize collective knowledge, discover the structure of user-generated communities, and predict emerging trends and group behavior. Her empirical and experimental studies identified the importance of cognitive biases to understanding individual and collective behavior online.Teaching Assistants
Erin F. Ochoa
Erin is a PhD student in Sociology and a Master’s student in Statistics at Northwestern University. She holds an MA in Computational Social Science from the University of Chicago and a BA in Criminology from the University of New Mexico. Her research uses computational, statistical, and spatial methods and focuses on neighborhood crime and community anti-violence programs.Participants
Fernando Calderón Figueroa
Fernando is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Toronto. His dissertation addresses the relationship between the built environment and social capital. Fernando is a member of the School of Cities and the Urban Genome Project. His interests are urban and political sociology, social policy, and computational methods.Hyunsik Chun
Isabel Constantino
Isabel Constantino is a PhD student in Informatics at Indiana University. Her research interests are in network science and graph embedding, and their applications to science and innovation studies.
Jordan Daley
Jordan is a doctoral student in the Northwestern University Social Psychology program, where he is a member of the Social Cognition Lab. His research explores the mechanisms that drive social biases. He hopes to apply innovative methods to improve representation, leverage naturalistic contexts, and improve theory in his field.
Chris Etheridge
Chris Etheridge is an Assistant Professor in journalism and mass communication at the University of Kansas. He researches the community effects of media representations of crime and public safety.
Leanne Fan
Leanne is a sociology PhD student with untamed research interests in expectations of the future, barriers to class consciousness, urban inequality, and digital communities. She is interested in applying textual analysis and spatial regression to understand these social phenomena better.
Alberto Guzman-Alvarez
Alberto Guzman-Alvarez is a Ph.D. student in Learning Sciences and Policy at the University of Pittsburgh, School of Education. His research focuses on applying and developing quantitative methods for evaluating the effectiveness of education policies and interventions. In particular, he is interested in college access issues affecting first-generation, historically marginalized students. He earned his B.S. in Psychology from UC Davis, and a Masters in Research Methodology from the University of Pittsburgh.Samaa Haniya
Samaa Haniya is an adult education faculty at Parkland College in Illinois, and e-Learning consultant at various institutions. Her research examines user experience, instructional models, and learning behaviors in e-Learning environments in relation to learner differences. She aims to humanize education practices through pedagogical transformation to foster equitable mastery learning.
Phyllis Johnson
Phyllis Johnson is an archaeologist whose research uses computational theory and methods, such as agent-based modeling and dynamic image analysis, to examine the dialectic relationship between social structure, ancient economies, and stone tool production. Phyllis recently defended her dissertation and will soon begin a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Kentucky.
Nick Judd
Nick Judd is a postdoctoral fellow in Sociology and the College at The University of Chicago, where he completed his Ph.D. in Sociology. Using machine learning, Bayesian statistics, and semi-structured interviews, Nick makes inferences about the social structures of political elites, and how those structures predict action in formal politics.
Devika Lakhote
As a PhD student at the Pearson Institute and Harris School of Public Policy, Devika Lakhote studies the role of social identity in access to goods in India. Originally from Mumbai, completed a BA in economics with distinction from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai. Following graduation, Lakhote worked at MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) in Bangalore, India. More recently, Lakhote was a predoctoral research fellow at Stanford University’s Institute for Economic Policy Research.
Jim Larson
Jim Larson is professor emeritus of psychology at both Loyola University Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is also an associate editor of Group Processes and Intergroup Relations. He studies the interaction dynamics of small task-performing groups, including how those dynamics might be modeled computationally.
Avital Livny
Avital Livny is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University and an M.Phil. in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the politics of religion and ethnicity, particularly the micro-foundations of identity-based mobilization and the measurement of identity and diversity, with a focus on Turkey and the Middle East.
Jolen Martinez
Jolen Martinez is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He earned B.A.s in Anthropology and History at Rice University. His undergraduate research investigated technologies associated with enumerating and constructing homelessness in Houston, Texas. His current work is on digital colonialism, histories of extraction, and embodied networks of informational/computer sciences among Latin Americans living at the borderlands of the U.S. and Mexico.
Thomas Pellet
Thomas Pellet is a doctoral student in the Northwestern Economics department. His current research examines the role of networks in the macroeconomy. He holds a masters from SciencesPo and HEC Paris. Prior to graduate school, Thomas worked at the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) and the World Bank as a research assistant.
Yifan Qian
Yifan Qian is a PhD student at Queen Mary University of London. He will be joining Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University as a Postdoc in 2021. His research is broadly concerned with science of science and combines theories and methods from network science, sociology, and machine learning.
Shadi Rezapour
Shadi Rezapour is a Ph.D. Candidate at the School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests lie at the intersection of computational social science and natural language processing (NLP). More specifically, she is interested in developing computational models to better understand and explain real-world behaviors, attitudes, and cultures by combining methods from NLP, network analysis, and machine learning with social science theories.
Apollo Rydzik
Apollo Rydzik is a doctoral student in Sociology at Stanford University and a National Science Foundation Fellow. He uses mixed-methods to study transgender experiences with police violence, the crimmigration system, and social movements. He holds a BA from Stanford and an AA from Foothill Community College.
Malik Salami
Malik is a doctoral student at School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. My present research areas revolve around knowledge diffusion and innovation, scholarly communication, health informatics and science of science focusing on African science and African scientific communities. I am interested in leveraging on social computational techniques to drive and understand my research and expand its frontier.Jamshid Sourati
Mengyi Sun
Mengyi Sun is a doctoral student in Jianzhi Zhang’s lab at the University of Michigan and an incoming postdoc in Luis Amaral’s lab at Northwestern University. He plans to study the research activities of biomedical scientists, leveraging his insider knowledge about biologists and his expertise in data science.
Rahardhika Utama
Rahardhika Utama is an Arryman Scholar, a Global Impacts fellow at the Buffett Institute, and a PhD candidate in Sociology at Northwestern. His research examines historical factors that transform and sustain agrarian society by tracing domestic and international forces that shape diverging paths of development in the Asian Rubber Belt.
Binglu Wang
Binglu Wang is a doctoral student in Management & Organizations (MORS) at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, with affiliations at the Center for Science of Science and Innovation (CSSI) and the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO). Her research involves computational social science, technology & innovation, and social networks, with a focus on understanding how community collapses from large-scale datasets. She received her bachelor's degree in management information system from Peking University in 2019.
Chelsey Wilks
Chelsey Wilks is an assistant professor of health and data science at the University of Missouri-St Louis. She received her PhD in clinical psychology at the University of Washington, and post-doctoral training in epidemiology at Harvard University. Dr. Wilks' research is at the intersection of clinical psychology, computer science, and public health with the goal of reducing self-destructive behaviors through the use of technology.
Ellie F. Yang
Ellie F. Yang is a Ph.D. candidate in mass communication at UW-Madison. She conducts research in optimizing media technology and message effects to improve well-being for vulnerable populations. Her recent work focuses on understanding mobile app support for patients living with substance use disorders and the communication dynamics in online communities. She also devotes herself to social practices related to narrowing digital divides in terms of analytical tool access.
Yiyan Zhang
Yiyan Zhang is a Ph.D. candidate in Emerging Media Studies at Boston University. She earned her bachelor’s degree in advertising and economy from Peking University. Her research focuses on mediated communication between citizens, news media, and governments on digital platforms. Methodologically, she connects surveys, digital texts, and experiments employing advanced statistical methods, automatic content analyses, and network analysis, etc.
Maggie Zhang
Maggie (Mengqing) Zhang is a Ph.D. Student at Institute of Communication Research at UIUC. Maggie holds a BA in journalism from Tsinghua and an M.Phil in communication from Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests are computational political communication, with particular focuses on networked communication processes and media effects.Yaxi Zhao
