Prof. Bo JIANG, Research Assistant Professor (Profile)
Bo Jiang is a Research Assistant Professor in The Department of Sociology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is primarily interested in topics related to transnational crimes and evidence-based policing. His research relies on interdisciplinary approaches to address policy-relevant issues within criminology and sociology, drawing on methods from computational sciences. His current work focuses on (1) statistical learning of terrorist organizations; and (2) spatial-temporal analysis of crime hot spots and harm spots.
Prof. Jiang earned a PhD from the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland and MS degree from the Department of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania. He spent five years as a Graduate Research Assistant at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START). Since 2018, he has held an appointment with the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge as a Data Analysis Consultant.
Prof. Jaemin LEE, Assistant Professor (Profile)
Jaemin Lee is a social scientist interested in social networks, mathematical sociology, and computational social science. He studies social influence in the political, economic, and school contexts. 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.
A sociology Ph.D. from Duke University, Prof. Lee worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Northeastern University’s Network Science Institute. He received an Outstanding Dissertation-in-Progress Award by the American Sociological Association’s Mathematical Sociology Section and a Paul Lazarsfeld Best Paper Award from the American Political Science Association (Political Communication).
Prof. Wensong SHEN, Assistant Professor (Profile)
Wensong Shen is an incoming Assistant Professor of Sociology at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He received his Ph.D. degree in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania in May 2020. His research focuses on education and health, and especially the interaction between education and health in the context of social stratification and inequality. Broadly speaking, Prof. Shen utilizes quantitative methods to explore how individuals and families with different social backgrounds experience the complex process of social stratification, and how such experiences shape their life opportunities and consequences such as education and health.
Prof. Ling ZHU, Assistant Professor (Profile)
Ling Zhu received an MS in Statistics and a PhD in Sociology from Stanford University. Before joining CUHK she was a post-doctoral fellow at the Stanford Center for Poverty and Inequality. Her overarching research interests consist of two substantive topics and one methodological theme: (1) state governance in authoritarian regimes – how the bureaucratic organizations are structured and the bureaucrats are incentivized to maintain a delicate balance between political control (which requires power centralization) and regional development (which requires power de-centralization), (2) mechanisms of reproducing economic inequality, gender segregation, and family advantages/disadvantages in China and in the United States, and (3) understanding misuses of causal inference methodology. The substantive studies are unified by a sociological interest in understanding how political and social institutions work together to shape social structures and often built on newly available big data and state-of-the-art data analytics for causal inference, network analysis, and machine learning techniques.