I am an Assistant Professor of Computational Social Science in the Department of Methodology and an affiliate at the Data Science Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science. I specialize in computational methods and comparative politics. Substantively, I focus on Chinese politics, LGBT politics, and social media politics. My methods research involves applied machine learning, quantitative text analysis, and fairness and bias in AI. I hold a Ph.D. in Political Science and Scientific Computing from the University of Michigan.

My substantive research centers on repression and media/information control. In my book project and related writings, I examine how the Chinese Communist Party has established a surveillance-driven security state in partnership with tech giants. I argue that these state-firm collaborations aid in target selection, concealing state repression from citizens, and thus reducing the potential for popular counter-mobilization.

In a separate thread of research, I investigate how elites mobilize social and religious conservatives by provoking outrage and disgust, leading to increased support for violence and punitive policies against minority groups.

Methodologically, I develop tools and frameworks to digitize and annotate large text corpora, utilizing out-of-sample validation, transfer learning, and active learning.

My research has been featured in The Monkey Cage (Washington Post), China File, and 端傳媒. My research with The Citizen Lab has been featured in New York Times, China Digital Times, Telegraph, AP，立場新聞, and 明報新聞.