Current AQM Students

Jiebiao Wang is a Ph.D. student at the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice. Previously, he worked in the School of Public Policy & Management at Tsinghua University as a research assistant. His research interests center on the well-being of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD), health policy, advanced quantitative methods, and machine learning. Besides, he is interested in computational text analysis using Twitter APIs to collect the corpus and analyze large-scale administrative datasets utilizing machine learning algorithms.

He is from Inner Mongolia, China. He received his MSW at Washington University in St. Louis and a Bachelor from the University of Science and Technology Beijing.

Hyunku Kwon is a PhD student in sociology. He specializes in political and historical sociology, with a focus on American political history, the state and the market, social networks, and political beliefs. He is particularly interested in the relationship between social structures and political beliefs (especially those pertaining to nativism, populism, and racism). His current work uses statistical, archival, and computational methods to study (1) the subjective representations of political polarization, (2) how ethnic networks both enabled and limited radicalism in Chicago in the late nineteenth century, and (3) deep learning approach to political ideology. He is also a member of two research groups at the University of Chicago: the Culture and Action Network and Knowledge Lab.

Andrew is a Ph.D. student in the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice. Previously, they worked in the Los Angeles Unified School District as a high school math and engineering teacher, intervention coordinator, and instructional coach. Andrew is interested in critically assessing how racism and linguistic marginalization are operationalized and resisted in urban school systems and the communities they seek to serve, particularly through sociotechnical systems like school ratings, attendance boundaries, and school choice. When it comes to quantitative methods, Andrew is interested in system dynamics modeling, causal inference, and QuantCrit approaches. Andrew received a B.S. in Systems Science and Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis and an M.A. in Education from Claremont Graduate University with the support of Math for America Los Angeles.

Jessica is a Finance PhD student at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Her research interests lie broadly at the intersection of asset pricing and corporate finance, with a focus on financial intermediation, corporate debt and contracting, market structure, and implications of financial frictions. Currently, her work is focused on debt contracts and creditor governance, over-the-counter markets, and dynamic asset pricing.

Aaron Stagoff-Belfort is a sociology Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago. He is a Research Assistant for the UChicago Justice Project and an Urban Doctoral Fellow at the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation. His research interests lie at the intersection of policing and the criminal legal system, urban sociology, and race-class inequality. He uses mixed methods, including statistical tools and causal inference, as well as social network analysis, to advance two related research agendas. The first investigates how policing might effect socioeconomic wellbeing and health, particularly the role policing plays in producing inequality and stratification. The second explores approaches to building safer neighborhoods without relying on punitive social control mechanisms. Both bodies of work consider the role of community and state institutions in providing security and how institutions outside of the legal system can build social cohesion and enhance community safety. Prior to coming to the University of Chicago, he worked as a Program Associate in the Redefining Public Safety Program at the Vera Institute of Justice in New York City. He received a Bachelor of Arts in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University.