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 X Behavioral Strategy: I combine computational modeling, quantitative and qualitative methods to understand (a) how founders learn from a paucity of experience, (b) how founders’ learning strategies influence the mental models they acquire, and shape their subsequent decisions, (c) for platform entrepreneurs, how conflicts in mental models can compromise effectiveness in governance, and (d) how to coordinate mental models through language.
• 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 spent wonderful time doing research on cognitive modeling in Dr. Cleotilde (Coty) Gonzalez’s Dynamic Decision Making Lab at CMU’s Department of Social and Decision Sciences (SDS) .

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