I am a dual-title Ph.D. in Political Science (major in Comparative Politics and minor in Quantitative Methods) and Social Data Analytics (SoDA) at the Pennsylvania State University. I study the intersection between authoritarian politics, contentious politics, political communication, computational social science with a regional focus on East Asia.

My dissertation, co-advised by Prof. Joseph Wright and Prof. Bruce Desmarais, investigates how online opinion leaders—such as influencers, journalists, experts, and activists—shape public opinion and political behavior across domestic and international contexts, and the resulting implications for authoritarian stability. Beyond my dissertation, I examine how authoritarian state actors adopt preemptive information strategies to curtail collective action. I am also dedicated to applying state-of-the-art computational methods to measure latent and subjective attributes in public opinion research, including deep learning model for stance detection, LLM-assisted visual analysis for emotions extraction, and double-list experiments to uncover preference falsification.

I received my B.S.Sc in Government and Public Administration (minor in Sociology, Philosophy, and German Studies) from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2015 and my M.A in International Political Economy from the University of Warwick in 2016. Before my Ph.D. study, I worked as a research officer at the The Hong Kong Council of Social Services and published three reports on Hong Kong’s social welfare policies.

My research has been published in The Chinese Journal of Communication, Policing, East Asia, and other journals. I also contribute op-eds and comments on English and Chinese media, such as The New York Times and the Initium 端傳媒