YUQI LIANG
Hello!
I am Yuqi Liang
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A first-year Ph.D. student in computational social sciences at the University of Oxford.
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Thesis: The roles of stereotypes, skills, and algorithms on the emergence of the gender gap in the Information Technology industry.
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A social scientist (especially in sociology and economics), programmer, musician, and archer.
About Me.
My name is Yuqi Liang (in Chinese: 梁彧祺), originally from Guilin, China.
I am currently a Ph.D. student at the Department of Sociology, and a member of St Catherine's College, the University of Oxford. As a social scientist and programmer, I am passionate about using quantitative and computational methods (especially natural language processing, social network analysis and agent-based simulations) to understand social and economic problems.
I have work experience in full-stack programming, data analysis, and product operations in tech companies. Strongly motivated by my own life experience, my Ph.D. thesis is about understanding the IT gender gap in education, labor market, and algorithms under technological change.
Hobbies: Beyond my research, I am very interested in singing, playing instruments (piano, guitar, and Xiao), and writing my own songs. I love comics and watercolour drawing, and I have started to learn painting since I was four years old. I am also an enthusiastic archer with my traditional Chinese bow. This is because, while doing it, I always feel deep tranquility as if I am a drop of water falling into a lake. In addition, I enjoy doing yoga, Chinese martial arts, meditation, and Traditional Chinese Medicine (acupuncture, herbal medicine, and Tui-Na).
Previous education: Master of Science in Social Data Analytics at University College Dublin (Ireland), Bachelor in Sociology at Northwest A&F University (China).
Research interests:
(1) Research fields: computational social sciences, labor economics, social and economic inequality, innovation and technological change
(2) Research methods: natural language processing, social networks analysis, deep learning, causal inference, statistical methods
My family motivates me to go further.
I was very fortunate to be born and raised in such a lovely family, where every family member is warm-hearted, capable, and filled with hope and wisdom about life.
My grandparents suffered very much from poverty and health issues, which has planted a seed in my heart to investigate socio-economic inequality problems as a social scientist.
In my home country, many women including me in the past have trapped in social norms with gender biases. This was the reason why I decided to challenge this gender bias by becoming a programmer. It turns out to be not a very difficult move and I enjoy coding very much.
As a female programmer, I aim at supporting more women like me in the past and my grandmother who did not dare to follow their heart.
What will be offered on my personal website?
While my personal website is still its infancy without much content, I am planning to share my thoughts regularly as a blogger. As of yet, I have the following topics in my mind:
1. The research journey of a Ph.D. student in computational social science:
(1) Ideas about my multidisciplinary Ph.D. research project;
(2) Lessons that I have learned while conducting my own research;
(3) Methods to conduct multi-disciplinary research.
2. From a sociologist to a programmer, and then a computational social scientist, my life journey from Guilin to Ireland, and the U.K.
3. Introductory videos explaining programming and computational social science in a very intuitive way.
4. My music.
Many thanks for visiting my personal website. Please feel free to contact me if you have any ideas or questions.