People
Faculty
Jaemin Lee
Jaemin Lee is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). He obtained his Ph.D. in Sociology at Duke University in 2018. His research aims to understand various substantive topics including political polarization, product diffusion, friendship segregation, and intergroup relations. Methodologically, he uses agent-based modeling, field experiments, and longitudinal network analysis.
Han Zhang
Han Zhang is an Assistant Professor in Division of Social Science, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). He obtained his Ph.D. in Sociology at Princeton University in 2020, under the supervision of Matthew Salganik. He obtained His B.S. in Computer Science and B.A. in History, 2013, from Peking University. His research spans computational social science, social movements, and quantitative methods.
Haohan Chen
Haohan Chen is an Assistant Professor in Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Hong Kong. He received his PhD in Political Science and MS in Statistical Science from Duke University in December 2019. His substantive research focuses on political behavior and political communication under both authoritarian and democratic contexts. His methodological research focuses on machine learning methods for text and network data from social media.Speakers
Abdullah Almaatouq
Abdullah Almaatouq is an assistant professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He obtained a PhD in Computational Science and Engineering and a dual master’s from MIT. Abdullah’s research lies at the intersection of computer science and human behavior, and focuses on collective intelligence and large-scale experimentation. His current work centers on questions related to whether and, if so, under what conditions groups exhibit superior performance outcomes relative to individuals.
Tarani Chandola
Tarani is a professor of medical sociology and the director of the Methods Hub in the Faculty of the Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong. He obtained his DPhil in Sociology from Nuffield College, University of Oxford. His research is primarily on the social determinants of health, focusing on health inequalities and psychosocial factors, and the analysis of longitudinal cohort studies.
Thomas R. Davidson
Tom Davidson is an assistant professor of sociology at Rutgers University—New Brunswick. He received his PhD in sociology from Cornell University. His research and teaching interests include political sociology and social movements, culture, and social networks. He specializes in using computational methods including natural language processing and machine-learning to analyze data collected from social media platforms.
King-wa Fu
King-wa FU is an Associate Professor at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre of The University of Hong Kong. He obtained his PhD in journalism and media studies from the University of Hong Kong. His research interests include China’s information governance, media and political participation, computational social sciences, health and the media, and media use by the younger generation. He is the Principle Investigator of Weiboscope, WeChatscope, and ANTIELAB Research Data Archive.
Ashley Gromis
Ashley Gromis is a postdoctoral research associate at the Eviction Lab of Princeton University. She completed her PhD in sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on how social networks and local communities provide the social context for individual decisions and events that aggregate to form macro-level patterns across space and time.
David Hagmann
David Hagmann is an assistant professor at the Department of Management, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He received his PhD from the Department of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. His research draws on experimental tools from psychology and economics to study how people engage with information and how this affects the decisions they make.
Bo Huang
Bo Huang is a professor in the Department of Geography and Resource Management, Associate Director of Institute of Space and Earth Information Science, and a co-director of the Computational Social Science Laboratory at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He obtained his PhD from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He uses geospatial big data to address urban environmental problems.
Ka-Yuet Liu
Ka-Yuet Liu is an associate professor of sociology at UCLA. She received her D.Phil in Sociology from Nuffield College, University of Oxford. Her research applies data science methods and social network analysis to epidemiological questions. Her major test cases are the diffusion of health conditions that people don't typically associate with network processes.
Christopher Lucas
Christopher Lucas is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and a faculty affiliate with the Division of Computational & Data Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University. Lucas studies methodology, political communication, and the media. His research develops and applies computational models for the statistical analysis of speech audio.
Zachary C. Steinert-Threlkeld
Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld is an assistant professor of Public Policy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. He received his Ph.D. in political science from UC San Diego. Steinert-Threlkeld’s work focuses on protest dynamics using natural language processing, computer vision, and large-scale simulations. He has studied protests around the world, including Arab Spring, protests in East Asia, and South America.Teaching Assistants
Yujie LI
Yujie Li is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests include computational social science, political communication, and social networks. Currently, he is working on some projects that mainly use agent-based modeling and longitudinal network analysis method.
Li LIAO
Li Liao is a PhD candidate at the University of Hong Kong. He studies authoritarianism and public administration. He’s interested in data visualization and text as data.Participants
Huanyu BAO
Huanyu BAO is a PhD Candidate at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her research interests are health technology and public health communication. Specifically, how health technology can be used to benefit different social groups in both physical and mental health, and how to bridge inequalities in the field of health technology and big data. Currently, she is working on projects on (a) health apps and wearables use among the unprivileged in Singapore, (b) data absenteeism and data chauvinism on different social media platforms.Yun-Tzu CHANG
Yun-Tzu CHANG is a first-year PhD student in Sociology at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). Before she joined HKU, she completed her Bachelor’s and M.Phil. degree in Sociology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her current research interest and the focus of her PhD thesis is on the diasporic politics of overseas Chinese new migrants. Specifically, she intends to incorporate the extent to which and how technology is a mechanism that facilitates long-distance nationalism among overseas Chinese new migrants.
Seong Hah CHO
Seong is a final year PhD student at the Psychology department at the University of Hong Kong. His current research relates to using network analyses to predict the long term outcomes of stroke. His research interests are applying network analyses in order to understand misinformation and translate such research into actionable outcomes.
Guo (Jerry) CHENG
Guo (Jerry) CHENG is a newly admitted student in UChicago’s Master program of Computational Social Science – Economics Track. He obtained his bachelor degree at the City University of Hong Kong, majoring in Finance, minoring in Mathematics and Computing. He has a keen interest in both empirical and theoretical research in economics, finance, public policy, sociology, etc., with cutting-edge computational techniques. Specific topics include CBDC, virtual banking, anti-money laundering, labor economics, innovation, etc.
Tianwen DU
Tianwen Du is currently an Academic Master student of Economics at Wuhan University. He obtained his bachelor’s degree in economics at Wuhan University and a double degree in Computer Science and Technology at Huazhong University of Science and Technology. His research interests include digital economy, information system, and using machine learning to make predictions or help with causal inference. His past research has focused on quantitative investment strategies and international financial markets.
Naikang FENG
Naikang FENG is a PhD student in the the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Hong Kong. She studies policy implementation and adaption with a focus on the policy role of street-level organizations (SLO) and bureaucrats (SLB). She is now working on a project on China’s food safety regulatory reform where she uses text-as-data methods to analyze the varieties and dynamics of instrument mix employed in frontline policy implementation.
Yiqing GAN
Yiqing Gan is a postdoctoral fellow in the Sociology Department and the Centre for Population Research at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests lie primarily in the fields of family demography and migration. Specific topics include (a) the construction and change of people’s childbearing desire in the current era of low fertility, and (b) the impact of migration trajectories on people’s subjective well-being. She is keen to apply computational methods to explore the two classic research fields above.
Jing GUO
Jing GUO is a doctoral student of communication studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her current research interests focus on political communication and social media, mainly with quantitative methods. Before rejoining the academia, she had 6-year working experiences in government and financial industries.
Sean GUO
Sean GUO is a current PhD candidate at the University of Hong Kong. His research interests are uncovering mechanisms behind misinformation spread as well as neuropsychological investigations into misinformation learning and correction. He is currently doing EEG research into how misinformation memory changes over time and is interested in diversifying his methodologies to include real world data such as social media activity and text analysis.
Xiaohui JIANG
Xiaohui JIANG is currently a Mphil student of public policy at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She is also an incoming PhD at the department of geography at the University of Zurich. Her research focuses on smart city, innovation policies, and technology development.
Meng JIN
Meng JIN is a MSc student at London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), majoring in development studies. Her current research focuses on informal sector and social protection, studying different social protection approaches in China. She has also conducted sustainability-related studies including climate-induced poverty, climate securitization and environmental governance. She gained her bachelor’s degree at Peking University majoring in public policy.
Siqin KANG
Siqin KANG is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Hong Kong. He has obtained the degree of Mphil in Social Science from HKUST. His research interest includes politics of China, state capacity and public opinion.
Qing LAN
Qing LAN is currently a PhD student at the University of Macau. Her research interests include family and ageing, data mining and household dynamics. She is now working on a project about the influence of household structure on municipal solid waste (MSW) generation.
Zhengyi LIANG
Zhengyi LIANG is an incoming Phd student at the department of communication at UC Davis. She has great interests in computational social science and political communication. She is currently investigating the relationships between ideology and reading through large-scale data.
Baiqi LI
Baiqi LI is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Journalism at Hong Kong Baptist University. Her research interests center around online incivility in Hong Kong. She is also fascinated by other information disorder behaviors such as misinformation and aggression, currently focusing on machine learning, computational communication, and quantitative methods.
Han LI
Han LI is an incoming postdoctoral researcher at the National University of Singapore. She received her PhD in the School of Journalism at Fudan University. She also holds dual M.A. in Communication from Simon Fraser University and Communication University of China. Her dissertation research studied how community platform influences the exchanges of social support in online mental health communities. She is particular interested in understanding how communication technologies can be designed and used to enhance social relationships and promote health and well-being.
Jia (Jessica) LI
Jia (Jessica) LI is currently working as a scientific officer in the School of Public Health and Primary Care at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include social determinants of health, preventive intervention, and gerontechnology. She is keen to learn the methods to incorporate data science into social science and population health research.
Sinan LI
Sinan is a Master of Public Administration candidate at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She studies climate policy, development economics and international political economy.
Wenyu LI
Wenyu LI is a PhD student in Geography and Resource Management at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Wenyu is funded by the Computational Social Science PhD Fellowship Scheme of CUHK. She has a background in geography monitoring and geoinformation science. Her research interest includes resilience and sustainable development of cities. She currently applies quantitative and computational methods to evaluate the process of cities and generate their optimal pathways toward achieving SDGs.
Xiaotong LI
Xiaotong LI is a Ph.D. student in the Division of Public Policy at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Her research interests broadly lie in health economics, primary healthcare and health policy. Currently, she is working on projects related to how various changes in policy and industry environment affect physician behaviors and how these behaviors, in turn, impact patient outcomes.
Haixin MU
Haixin MU is a Ph.D. student in School of Journalism and Communication, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Apart from computational social science, she is also interested in gender and women's studies. Currently she is exploring perceived authenticity following the approach of computer-mediated communication.
Hakimeh NASIRI
Hakimeh NASIRI is PhD candidate at HK PolyU, the School of Hotel & Tourism Management. She conducted a mixed-method research exploring how beauty in the context of society may become a double-edged sword. During her PhD, Hakimeh developed a data collection platform (IranQuestion.com). She is interested in using computational social method to move forward the field of Tourism Aesthetic Experience research. Also, she is active in spreading her takeaway from her learnings to under-represented intellectual community of students and non-elite community of tourism and hospitality business directors in Iran. Hakimeh ranked the Top and the First among 3449 applicants of Nationwide Master Entrance Exam in the field of Tourism Management in Iran. Before pursuing PhD, she had 10 years’ industry experience in tourism and hospitality, including social media marketing director of two nationwide tourism festivals. Moreover, Hakimeh is founder and ex-CEO of a travel business (GoToYazd.com).Marianne von Blomberg
Marianne is a Research Associate at Cologne University's Chair for Chinese Legal Culture. She examines how social credit systems strengthen, undermine, and transform the law and legal institutions in China. Currently, she is a visiting researcher at City University of Hong Kong's School of Law.
Shengbin WEI
Shengbin WEI is an MPhil student in the HKUST Social Science division. I am interested in quantitative history. I use historical multi-generational population datasets to study demographic behaviors in late imperial China. Besides traditional methods, I like exploring other approaches to study historical longitudinal datasets. I apply social network analysis to study personnel spatial mobility among officials in late imperial China with a government employee database.
Samson YUEN
Samson Yuen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government and International Studies at Hong Kong Baptist University. He researches contentious politics, civil conflicts, public opinion, health and food politics, focusing particularly on East Asia. He holds a DPhil in Politics from Oxford University.
Xiaoqian YUE
Xiaoqian YUE is a PhD candidate at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research focuses on the use of computational methods in the study of human behaviour. She uses various computational methods, including social network analysis, computational textual analysis, and machine learning. She is currently studying the diffusion of innovations in government behaviour in social media.