Biography

I am an economic sociologist and organizational theorist in the Management & Organizations Department at Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. I will be joining the Department of Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology at the Stockholm School of Economics as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2022.

My research primarily concerns the role of cognition in entrepreneurship, organization design and social networks. More information can be found on my CV .

• 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 Organization design: 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, computational and experimental 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 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.