People
Faculty
Jennie Brand
Jennie E. Brand is Professor of Sociology and Professor of Statistics and Data Science (by courtesy) at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She is Co-Director of the Center for Social Statistics (CSS) at UCLA. She is President of the International Sociological Association (ISA) Research Committee on Social Stratification and Mobility (RC28). She is the previous Chair of the Methodology Section and the Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA). She was elected to the Sociological Research Association (SRA), an honor society for excellence in research, in 2019, and received the ASA Methodology Leo Goodman Mid-Career Award in 2016, and honorable mention for the ASA Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility William Julius Wilson Mid-Career Award in 2014. Prof. Brand is a member of the Technical Review Committee for the National Longitudinal Surveys Program at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. She was previously a member of the Board of Overseers of the General Social Survey (GSS). Prof. Brand studies social stratification and inequality, mobility, social demography, education, and methods for causal inference.
Ian Lundberg
Ian Lundberg is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at UCLA. His research develops statistical methods and applies those methods to questions about inequality, poverty, and mobility. After completing his PhD in sociology at Princeton University, Ian spent one year as a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Sociology at UCLA. Ian enjoys hiking, surfing, and making oatmeal with blueberries.
Christina Wilmot
Christina Wilmot is a Ph.D. student in sociology at UCLA. Previously, she studied computer science and worked as a software engineer at Google. She is interested in the varying intersections of technology and society, including using novel computational methods to analyze social information, studying online social behavior, and looking at the effects of the adoption of new technologies on a society. She also aims to make computational methods more accessible to social researchers from a variety of substantive and methodological fields.
Keri Lintz
Keri Lintz is a third-year PhD student at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, Department of Social Welfare. Broadly, she studies the ways in which social policies support families and address disparities in early childhood. Keri is keenly interested in the careful and purposeful application of causal inference methods to child and family policy, drawing on her background in public administration and social service delivery. Her current research evaluates the effects of policies and programs on family financial stability, early childhood mental health, and access to healthcare.
Kelsey Figone
Kelsey Figone is a PhD student in Economics at UCLA. She is interested in labor economics, demography, and urban and transportation economics. She attended SICSS in 2024 and is excited to expose other students to topics in computational social science.Speakers
Homa Hosseinmardi
Homa Hosseinmardi is an Assistant Professor of Data Science (DataX) and Computational Communication at UCLA, where she directs the OASIS Lab (Online and AI Systems’ Integrity & Safety). Her research takes a holistic, large-scale approach to understanding sociotechnical systems and information ecosystems, with a focus on safety and trustworthiness. She serves as an editor for the Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media, received the “Outstanding Research Award” during her Ph.D., and co-founded the CyberSafety workshop series.
Chad Hazlett
Chad Hazlett is a professor at UCLA in the Department of Statistics and Data Science and in the Department of Political Science, and Co-Director of the UCLA Practical Causal Inference Lab. His methodological work focuses on 'feasible' or 'practical' causal inference: developing research methods that enable researchers across disciplines to more feasibly make credible causal inferences from the available data and assumptions. His substantive work has focused on civil war, indiscriminate violence, and mass atrocity.
Jiahui Xu
Jiahui Xu is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology and Demography at Pennsylvania State University. She is a computational sociologist and quantitative methodologist substantively focusing on social inequality. Her ongoing projects include: (1). adapting the generalized random forests for causal decomposition to investigate college returns; and (2). applying natural language processing models to tackle open-ended survey responses.
Amir Ghasemian
Amir Ghasemian is a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Communication at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research lies at the intersection of complex systems and computational social science, with a focus on analyzing and modeling networks and their dynamic behaviors. Drawing on tools from statistical inference, causal inference, Bayesian modeling, and machine learning, he develops principled methods to address challenges of heterogeneity, interdependence, and bias in large-scale data. His work advances tasks such as community detection, link prediction, and the study of social influence dynamics, as well as applications to digital information ecosystems and platform integrity.
Jake Anderson
Jake Anderson is a PhD student in the department of economics at UCLA, and 2024-2025 National Institute of Health T32 fellow. His research interests lie in the intersection of labor economics, crime and incarceration, and applied econometrics. Before his PhD, he worked as a data scientist at Uber, and earned an MA in Statistics from UC Berkeley and a BS in Mathematics and Computer Science from UC Irvine. Jake is passionate about teaching and coaching—in his free time serves as the coach of the UCLA Olympic Weightlifting team.
Duy Pham
Duy Pham is a 1st year Ph.D. student in Statistics and Data Science at UCLA. He is interested in developing robust causal methodologies for applied social science settings, such as education, as well as teaching causal inference and computational social sciences to broader audiences. His favorite Pokémon are Slowpoke and Psyduck.