The Computational Culture Lab
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People

Lab Directors

 Amir Goldberg

Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior
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​My work and interests lie at the intersection of computation and social science. As an undergraduate, I double majored in computer science and film studies at Tel-Aviv University. I have been exploring the connections between computation and culture ever since. I have an MA in sociology from Goldsmiths College, University of London, and a PhD in sociology from Princeton University. My work is not easily described using standard labels. I use computationally intensive language- and network-based methods applied to big data to model cultural dynamics in organizations, markets, and informal social groups. My research projects all share an overarching theme: the desire to understand the social mechanisms that underlie how people construct meaning and consequently pursue action. For more about my work, please visit my personal webpage.

Sameer B. Srivastava 

Ewald T. Grether Professor of Business Administration and Public Policy

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My research unpacks the interrelationships between the culture of social groups, the cognition of individuals in these groups, and the social networks that people form within and across groups. Much of my work is set in organizational contexts, where I use computational methods to examine how culture, cognition, and networks relate to career outcomes. As an undergraduate, I studied Economics at Harvard College. I then pursued a career in management consulting, earning an MBA from Harvard Business School along the way and eventually becoming a partner at Monitor Group (now Monitor Deloitte). I then returned to Harvard for a PhD in Organizational Behavior and Sociology. My work spans, and draws novel connections among, multiple levels of analysis. Although anchored in sociology, my research draws insight and perspective from neighboring disciplines such as social psychology, political science, and linguistics. For more about about my work, please visit my personal webpage. 

 Douglas Guilbeault

 Julien Clement

​Assistant Professor of Management of
​Organizations

Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior

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My work examines the role that communication networks play in the rise and spread of cultural phenomena, including linguistic categories and social norms. I specialize in combining agent-based modeling and mathematical techniques with online social network experiments. As an undergraduate, I double majored in philosophy and rhetoric, with a minor in cognitive science, at the University of Waterloo. I then pursued a master’s in cognitive linguistics at the University of British Columbia. I completed my Ph.D. at the Annenberg School for Communication (Upenn) as a member of the Network Dynamics Group, with a dissertation entitled “The Social Network Dynamics of Category Formation.” Fundamentally speaking, my research seeks to develop a computational theory of how social groups create shared systems of meaning to make sense of the world and themselves, and to coordinate collective behavior. For more about my work, please visit my personal page.
My work focuses on the dynamics of coordination inside organizations. I am especially interested in how formal and informal organizational structures interact to facilitate coordination among the members of an organization: how does an organization’s structure affect how its members form relationships, develop routines, and adapt these routines when environmental demands change?  How do formal structures emerge in the first place? And when can organizations thrive without any formal structure? I investigate these issues through a ‘micro-analytic’ approach: rather than study organizations as broad aggregates, I start by thinking about the dynamics of interactions among small numbers of individuals and then seek to understand how these interactions aggregate into organizational outcomes with the aid of different types of organizational structures. I engage in both theoretical work and empirical work. My theoretical work relies on agent-based models, while my empirical work typically relies on highly granular data which allow me to observe interactions among individuals and model the aggregation of these interactions into organizational outcomes.

Lab Members
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MADISON HALEY SINGELL
Stanford University

​​Madison is a PhD student in Macro Organizational Behavior at Stanford GSB. She is particularly interested in using simulation and computational techniques to understand how culture develops, changes, and impacts the lives of individuals. Prior to graduate school, she received her bachelor’s degree in Economics from Harvard and spent several years working in consulting, technology, and people analytics research. In her free time, Madison enjoys hiking with her dog and coaching youth soccer.
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Lara Yang
Stanford University
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​​Lara is a PhD candidate in Macro Organizational Behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business. She is broadly interested in using computational methods to better understand the dynamics of identity and culture at work, both at the individual and the organizational level of analysis. Her work employs a broad set of tools, including word embeddings, topic modeling, network analysis, and online surveys. Prior to Stanford, she received bachelor’s degrees in Computer Science and Psychology from University of California, Berkeley, and a master’s degree in Industrial Organizational Psychology from San Francisco State University. In her free time, Lara loves playing fetch with her dog Olive and teaching him bilingual commands.
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ABRAHAM OSHOTSE
Stanford University
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Abraham Oshotse is a PhD candidate in Organizational Behavior at Stanford GSB. He has special interests in processes of endogenous cultural change. His research on culture thus far has followed two streams: The first explores the dynamics of innovation, positioning, and success in cultural markets, by applying computational and machine learning methods to product feature data. The second focuses on cultural boundary marking and crossing among culturally distinct groups, using experimental approaches to understand the psychological mechanisms that prompt different types of affective responses. Prior to his PhD program, Abraham received an M.S. in Quantitative Methods from the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education and worked as a research analyst in the Capital Markets function at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
SAQIB MUMTAZ
University of California, Berkeley

Saqib is a third year PhD student in Management of Organizations (Macro) track at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley. He is interested in innovation, science of science, and organizational culture.
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ZIWEN CHEN
Stanford University

Ziwen Chen is a Ph.D. candidate in Organizational Behavior at Stanford GSB. She is particularly curious about the cognitive process and the knowledge structure that underpins culture as it is constructed, shared, reproduced collectively. She is also interested in how the internet, algorithms, and machines shape contemporary meaning production. In her research, she employs statistical and algorithmic methods (e.g., network analysis, natural language processing, causal inference) to analyze large-scale behavioral data. Prior to her Ph.D. program, Ziwen received an M.A. in Computational Social Science from the University of Chicago. Find out more about Ziwen at her personal website.
Xinrui Zhao
University of California, Berkeley

Xinrui is a Research Data Analyst working on projects under the Computational Culture Lab. She is particularly interested in utilizing computational linguistics and network analysis to understand the interplay between social network, human behavior and meaning production. She holds a B.S. in Mathematics and a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Chicago. 
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paul Vicinanza
Stanford University

Paul is a second-year PhD student in the Organizational Behavior department at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. Prior to attending Stanford he served as a visiting fellow and research assistant at the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems. His research utilizes modern computational-linguistic techniques to better understand broad patterns of societal change and evolution.
austin van loon
Stanford University

​Austin van Loon is a PhD candidate in the Sociology Department at Stanford University studying the meanings we make and how we think others think. He has special interest in the consequences of these for American politics and for organizational efficiency and fairness. In his research he utilizes a wide range of methods including: text analysis, network analysis, machine learning, experiments, and causal inference. Find out more at his personal website.
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DANYANG LI
University of California, Berkeley

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Danyang Li started the Ph.D. program in the Department of Sociology and with Designated Emphasis in Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley in 2020. She studies the sociology of culture, organizations, and markets. She is interested to understand the link between culture and power by examining how categories, discourses, and specific institutions emerge and evolve across time and social spheres through computational methods like network science and computer linguistics.
Miriam Hurtado bodell
Linköping University

Miriam Hurtado Bodell is a Ph.D. student in Analytical Sociology at the Institute for Analytical Sociology, Linköping University, Sweden. She is interested in how social scientists can develop and use theoretically-driven computational text analysis to study meaning-making processes. She is especially interested in how the meanings of politicized cultural objects, such as immigration, shift over time, diffuse between groups, and how external shocks impact the meanings people make.
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Alejandro Hermida 
LMU Munich School of Management

Alejandro is a PhD candidate at the LMU Munich School of Management. He is interested in the study of the self and identity generally, and the ways in which individuals manage their multiple sources of identity (e.g., family and work) specifically. In his research he uses both traditional, survey-based methodologies, as well as approaches that enable the obtainment and analysis of digital traces, such as web scrapping and natural language processing. He holds an MSc in Work, Economic, and Social Psychology from the LMU Munich, and a BSc in Psychology from the UNAM in Mexico City. In his free time, Alejandro reads novels, attends to techno events, and dances to Latin music.
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Top row (from left to right): Paul Vicinanza, Austin Van Loon, Amir Goldberg, Julien Clement, Abraham Oshotse, Douglas Guilbeault, Sameer Srivastava, Danyang Li
Bottom row (from left to right): Aparna Komarla, Saqib Mumtaz, Lara Yang, Ziwen Chen, Madison Haley Singell

Collaborators
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​Jennifer A. Chatman, Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley
Gabriel Doyle, Psychology Department, Stanford University
Michael C. Frank, Psychology Department, Stanford University
Giuseppe (Joe) Labianca, Gatton College of Business and Economics, University of Kentucky
Sanaz Mobasseri, Questrom School of Business, Boston University
Will Monroe, Computer Science Department, Stanford University
Christopher Potts, Linguistics Department, Stanford University
Melissa A. Valentine, Management Science & Engineering Department, Stanford University

Alumni
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Anjali Bhatt, Assistant Professor, Harvard Business School

Matthew Corritore, Assistant Professor, Strategy & Organization, Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University
Jesse Fagan, Lecturer in Data Analytics, University of Exeter Business School
Paul Gouvard, Assistant Professor of Organizational Theory, USI Università della Svizzera italiana 
Moritz Sudhof, co-founder and CEO Motive Software (now part of BetterUp)
Sarah Stein, Paradigm
Richard Lu, Data Scientist, Square
V. Govind Manian, AI / ML Engineer, Replit
Katharina Lix, AI / ML Product Manager, BetterUp
Barkha Agrawal, Software Engineer, Amazon

Jan Overgoor, Data Science Advisor, Self-Employed
​Aparna Komarla, Data Scientist, Solidigm
Aashna Garg, ML Engineer, Abnormal Security
Sangseok Lee, HR Data Scientist, KEPCO
Hope Harrington, PhD Student, Yale University

​Soomin Cho, PhD Student, Columbia Business School
Yixi Chen, PhD Student, Columbia Business School
​Suchin Gururangan, PhD Student, University of Washington
Kasyap Munukutla, Master's Student, University of Chicago

Samaksh (Avi) Goel, current Stanford undergraduate student
Julia Liu, current UC Berkeley undergraduate student

© Computational Culture Lab. 2020

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