Current AQM Students
Jiebiao Wang
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.
Isobel Heck
Isobel Heck started her PhD study in Psychology in 2016 at the Cornell University and transferred to the University of Chicago in 2019 with Prof. Katherine Kinzler. Her interests are on developmental psychology, social psychology, social status, and social hierarchies. Through taking statistics courses as a PhD student at Cornell, she have become increasingly aware of the benefits that a rich statistical toolkit can provide for tackling novel research questions. In her research, Isobel works with both children and adults, with a wide array of datasets (e.g., categorical, cross-sectional, longitudinal, nested, experimental, correlational). She hopes to use the AQM Certificate program to continue building her statistical toolkit, and gain deeper insight into the underlying theory supporting the statistical methods on a daily basis. Isobel also wants to connect with professors outside of her department who are experts in a variety of statistical methods.
Arvind Ilamaran
Arvind Ilamaran is a Ph.D. student with the Department of Comparative Human Development. He holds a Master of Public Policy from the Harris School of Public Policy with a focus on education policy and causal inference methods. His dissertation research examines noncompliance in randomized experiments within a stochastic framework. His other works in progress are studying the impact of parental engagement on post-secondary completion and measuring the impact of childhood polyvictimization on adolescent academic and mental health outcomes. He has completed the Certificate of Sustainable Urban Development from the Mansueto Institute of Urban Innovation and held their doctoral fellowship during 2020-2021.
Hyunku Kwon
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.
Ziwei Zhang
Ziwei Zhang joined the PhD program in Psychology in 2020 to study with Prof. Monica Rosenberg. Her interests include cognitive science, brain imaging, mechanisms of human learning, and mechanisms of human attention with main research interest focusing on the underlying mechanisms of human cognition. Ziwei deals with high-dimensional brain imaging data, and wants to combine computational modeling with brain imaging to better understand how the brain works to carry out different cognitive functions. She believes that she will benefit from theoretical understanding of statistics and more application beyond her own department/field and hopes to apply fundamentals learned from AQM courses to her research.
Andrew Frangos
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.
Henry Jones
Henry Jones joined the PhD program in Psychology in 2022, working with Prof. Ed Awh. He is interested in the cognitive and neural mechanisms that underlie adaptive behavior. His current research focuses on how people can maintain attention in concert with other information to support flexible action. He is interested in the format and dynamics of these representations – how quickly they are formed, how much information is stored, and how robust to interference they are. The work relies on high-dimensional brain imaging data from multiple acquisition methods, like fMRI and EEG, with structure in space and time. He believes that the AQM courses will provide a general framework that can enable applying the most powerful statistical method for each data type and question in his research.