Summer Institute in Computational Social Science

2025

2023

People

Faculty

Zixi Chen

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

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.

Yongjun Zhang

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.