Biography

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Management & Organizations Department at Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. I will be on the academic job market 2021-2022. Here is my CV .

My research concerns the role of cognition in entrepreneurship, behavioral strategy, and social networks.

• Cognition X Entrepreneurship: I combine computational modeling and qualitative methods to understand (a) how founders learn from a paucity of experience, (b) how founders’ learning strategies influence the structure of mental models they acquire, which subsequently shape their decisions.
• Cognition X Behavioral strategy: Stories and models are two primary ways that organizations coordinate the cognition of their members. Hence, I ask (a) what are the limits of coordination through language, and (b) what are the limits of coordination through algorithms.
• Cognition X Social networks: I study how individuals mentally organize their social connections. In particular, I find that independent of who you know, how you mentally organize who you know matters.

As a mixed-methods scholar, I use a combination of quantitative, qualitative, and computational methods. You can find resources on automating surveys (Javascript), interactive network analysis (R), and network learning experiments (Python) on my Github. I am a keen advocate for women in coding and reproducible research.

Prior to Northwestern, I obtained my B.S. in Experimental Psychology and B.A. in Digital Entertainment Design from Tsinghua University. I also had a wonderful time doing research on cognitive modeling in Dr. Cleotilde (Coty) Gonzalez’s Dynamic Decision Making Lab at Carnegie Mellon University.

When I am offline, I have fun playing pipa and cello.