Spring 2024 Office Hours:
T: 9:00 am - 12:00 pm
By appointment

Yongren Shi is a computational sociologist working in the areas of social networks, organizations, social psychology, and culture. He is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Iowa. The foundation of his research is the sociological study of human behavior and group dynamics. He uses extensively large-scale digital trace data and a wide range of computational methods, including network analysis, computational textual analysis, agent-based computational models, machine learning, online experiments and sequence analysis. His research appeared in outlets such as American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Nature Human Behavior, Social Forces, and Sociological Methods & Research, among others. His work was supported by research grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF 1409593 and NSF 1922906), and was covered by popular media outlets such as Wired, the Guardian, BBC News, Huffington Post, and LA Times.

Yongren received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Cornell University in 2016. His dissertation examined why seemingly apolitical issues, such as arts and sciences, became the new battleground for culture wars. After graduation, he spent two years as a Post-doctoral Associate at Yale Institute for Network Science, where he devoted much of the time to a study of social networks in rural communities in Honduras. 

He has broad (and developing) interests in networks, culture, groups, norms, politics, texts, languages, machine learning and deep learning, cognition, agent-based modeling, etc. Drop him a message if you want to chat about research.

Yongren Shi CV