Linda Zhao
Neubauer Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology and the College
Linda Zhao’s research focuses on how compositional features of social contexts such as diversity or group size shape intergroup dynamics in social networks, how networks and contexts influence behaviors and decisions, and how networks are a mechanism for inequality. She uses social networks to investigate intergroup dynamics, social influence, and inequality within three main substantive areas: immigrant integration, policing, and public health. Her current work leverages data from a range of contexts such as adolescent friendships in classrooms and officer networks in police departments, as well as quasi-experimental settings using computational models.
Her work has been published in Sociological Methods and Research, Demography, The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Journal of Higher Education, Journal of Number Theory, and Contemporary Mathematics.
Zhao earned a BA in economics from Princeton University, and an MA in statistics and PhD in sociology from Harvard University. Most recently, she was a Frank H. T. Rhodes Postdoctoral Fellow at the Cornell Population Center.