Welcome

I am a computational sociologist who applies natural language processing and computer vision to big data to study political, social, and organizational behavior. I received my Sociology PhD from the University of Arizona in 2020 and am an Assistant Professor of Sociology and the Institute for Advanced Computational Science (IACS) at Stony Brook University, with affiliations in Asian and Asian American Studies, the AI Innovation Institute, and the Center for Changing Systems of Power, and as a research affiliate at New York University.

My work has appeared in leading journals such as the American Journal of Sociology, Demography, the Journal of Marriage and Family, and Poetics, and has been recognized with the 2020 ASA James Coleman Award, among other honors. My current research examines mobility, segregation, and polarization in the U.S., and—increasingly—how AI shapes society and how society shapes AI, including the responsible use of AI to address challenges such as conflict, climate change, and community resilience.

I teach Intro to Computational Social Science and Research Methods in Sociology at Stony Brook University. If you need CSS-related talks or workshops, feel free to reach out.

Download my CV here.

Vibe Researching

I am developing Vibe Researching — a hands-on approach to doing empirical social science by directing coding agents (Claude Code, Codex) through the open-scholar-skill suite, with verification as the central discipline. I have written a participant handbook that walks all the way from installing the agents to a verified, journal-ready paper draft built on real CFPS data. Read it online (English and 中文), with copy-and-paste-ready commands, here: Vibe Researching.

The research talk behind these workshops — Vibe Researching as Wolf Coming: Can AI Agents with Skills Replace or Augment Social Scientists? — is also readable online, slide by slide in your browser: English slides · 中文幻灯片.

I have presented Vibe Researching in invited workshops, seminars, and courses in 2026, including:

Lingnan University — Vibe Researching with Agentic AI for Social Sciences, a seminar hosted by the Governance and Bureaucracy Lab, Department of Government and International Affairs (June 17).
University of Hong Kong (HKU) — Using AI in Social Science Research: From Smart Prompting to Research Agents, a one-day practical workshop co-led with Prof. Weidong Wang, hosted by the Faculty of Social Sciences and the Social Sciences Research Centre (June 18).
Zhejiang University (ZJU) — When AI Starts Writing Papers, Where Is the Future of PhD Students?, a lecture hosted by the School of Public Affairs (June 23).
NYU Shanghai — Agentic AI for Social Science Research, a course in the 2026 Summer School at CASER (July 1–5).
The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) — the CSSL@CUHK webinar Vibe Researching with Agentic AI for Social Sciences, hosted by the Computational Social Science Laboratory.

If you need Vibe Researching with coding agents workshops or lectures, please reach out to me directly: yongjun.zhang at stonybrook.edu.

Summer CSS Workshop

I am co-organizing the 2026 NYU Shanghai site for the Summer Institute of Computational Social Science (SICSS), June 24–30, 2026. See HERE

I co-organized the 2025 NYU Shanghai site for SICSS with Dr. Xiaogang Wu, Dr. Jia Miao, and Dr. Zixi Chen. See HERE

I co-organized the 2023 NYU Shanghai site for SICSS with Dr. Xiaogang Wu and Dr. Yongren Shi. See HERE

I also taught intro to CSS for NYU Shanghai CASER. Check here for the syllabus.

New Paper Alert

Ting‐Syuan Lin and Yongjun Zhang. “Multidimensional Segregation Among Asian American Voters: Racial, Income, and Partisan Sorting in New York and California.” Population, Space and Place 32, no. 4 (2026): e70271.

Hao Lin and Yongjun Zhang. 2025. “Navitaging The Risks of Using LLMs for Text Annotation in Social Science Research.” Social Science Computer Review.

Yongjun Zhang. 2025. “Generative AI has lowered the barriers to computational social sciences.” Journal of Intelligent Socities.