SFI Applied Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Sam Zhang wants to understand the causal mechanisms that drive outcomes — particularly the undesirable ones — in real-world complex social systems. How do the myriad social, institutional, and systemic forces we create sometimes collide to lead to inequalities and human-rights injustices?
Zhang began pursuing these questions as a summer Data Science for Social Good fellow at the University of Chicago after completing his B.A. at Swarthmore College. He used his computer science skills to study gaps in health insurance across U.S. communities and to develop tools to improve coverage. “It opened my mind to what was possible for social issues and advanced mathematics,” he says.
“Creating impact has always been a motivating factor for me,” says Zhang. “I’ve never been able to isolate myself from the problems affecting society and humanity. I love math and wanted to study it, but I realized quickly that I needed it to be connected to something moral and communal for it to have meaning for myself.”
Zhang went on to pursue a Ph.D. in applied mathematics at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he built tools to explore questions of equity and justice. With his advisor, SFI External Professor Aaron Clauset, Zhang studied inequalities in academia. And in his current research with fellow CU Boulder alumna Rayna Benzeev (UC Berkeley), he is developing new algorithmic methods to study how deforestation in Brazil is playing out on Indigenous lands versus privately owned land.
At SFI, Zhang will work with SFI Professor Cris Moore on questions of algorithmic justice, untangling and identifying racial disparities in the criminal justice system.
Zhang will begin his yearlong fellowship at SFI in October. In 2025, he plans to join the Complex Systems Center at the University of Vermont as an Assistant Professor of Statistics.