People

Lab Directors

 Amir Goldberg

 Professor of Organizational Behavior (and by courtesy, Sociology)
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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

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

Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior

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.

 Julien Clement

Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior

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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ALEJANDRO CANEK HERMIDA CARRILLO

​Alejandro Canek Hermida Carrillo is a Research Fellow at Imperial College London and an affiliated researcher with the Computational Culture Lab. His work integrates computational methods with sociological and social psychological theory to study how business and political leaders interpret the world, and how these interpretations interact with broader socio-economic structures. He approaches individuals and organizations as dynamic systems that evolve through continuous interaction with their social environments. Alejandro holds a PhD in Management from LMU Munich, an MSc in Economic, Organisational, and Social Psychology from LMU Munich, and a Licenciatura in Psychology from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). 

DANIEL LOBO

​Daniel Lobo (he/they) is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in political economy and the sociology of organizations and markets (joint with the Management of Organizations group at the Haas School of Business). As an economic sociologist, his research examines how organizational and cultural processes—especially those related to race, merit, and fairness—shape labor market outcomes and reproduce broader inequalities in income and wealth. He studies how elite institutions evaluate individuals through hiring and assessment practices, how these practices influence mobility and stratification, and the social and relational costs of upward mobility. His work uses mixed methods, including interviews, surveys, field experiments, and computational techniques. Daniel’s research has been published in the American Political Science Review and supported by organizations such as the Mellon Foundation, ACLS, NSF, and NIH. He holds an A.B. in Social Studies from Harvard College and an M.A. in Sociology from UC Berkeley.

DANYANG LI

Danyang Li is a PhD student in Sociology at UC Berkeley, focusing on the sociology of organizations and markets. Her research examines how cultural meanings and social classifications shape organizational practices and institutional arrangements. She is also interested in the role of science, technology, and computational methods in transforming social systems. Methodologically, she uses network analysis and computational linguistics to study how ideas, categories, and relations evolve across social contexts. She entered the doctoral program in 2020.

Gaveal Fan

Gaveal Jiayue Fan is a PhD student in Management of Organizations (Macro) at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley. She is broadly interested in computational social science, with a focus on using network analysis and large-scale simulations to study innovation and society. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from Cornell with majors in the College Scholar Program, Information Science, and Sociology.

Jingxin yang

Jingxin Yang is a master’s student in Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University, specializing in Computational Social Science.  She completed her undergraduate studies in Computer Science, and her research interests center on how computational models and large-scale data can be used to understand social dynamics and collective behavior. Her work has explored the robustness of social norms in modular networks through agent-based modeling. Outside of research, she enjoys a vibrant and creative life—she loves playing the piano, hiking, and experimenting with new recipes in the kitchen.

KARA LUO

​Kara Luo is a PhD Candidate in Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Her research centers on cognition, social relations, and culture, exploring how individuals perceive and navigate social environments. She uses a range of methodologies—including surveys, experiments, computational modeling, and natural language processing—to study how people understand and interact with the social world. Before beginning her doctoral studies, Kara earned dual bachelor’s degrees in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (EECS) and Mathematics, as well as a Master of Engineering, from MIT.

Lenard Strahringer

Lenard Strahringer is a PhD student in Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. His research examines how organizations design effective structures for collaboration and learning, and how these arrangements shape individual experiences, group dynamics, and overall organizational performance.
He is also interested in the role of reputation systems in shaping social behavior on online platforms. His first research article, which explores how reputation systems alter the way individuals form relationships, was published in Social Psychology Quarterly.

Madison Haley Singell

Madison Singell is a PhD Candidate in Macro Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Her research examines how people’s causal understandings—such as theories and narratives—shape strategic decision-making and collective agreement in organizations. She uses computational and mathematical modeling, as well as natural language processing, to study how these understandings appear in text data. Before graduate school, she earned a degree in Economics from Harvard and worked in consulting, technology, and people analytics research.

Miriam Hurtado Bodell

​Miriam Hurtado Bodell is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Her research focuses on theoretically grounded computational text analysis and the social processes through which meaning is created, diffused, and contested. She is particularly interested in how conceptual meanings evolve over time and travel across different social domains through interaction. Miriam holds a PhD in Analytical Sociology from Linköping University and remains affiliated with the Mining for Meaning project. She also earned a Master’s degree in Statistics and Machine Learning from Linköping University, as well as Bachelor’s degrees in Statistics and Political Science from Uppsala University.

​Muhua Huang

​Muhua Huang is a PhD student in Organizational Behavior (Micro-OB) at Stanford GSB. She studies the “characters” of humans and AI (e.g., personality, values, and culture), by treating AI either as “alien participants” or as a vast knowledge base. Her broader interests include social science methodology and metascience. Before Stanford, she earned an MA in Computational Social Science at UChicago and a BA in Computer Science and Psychology at UBC.

Sarayu Anshuman

Sarayu Anshuman is a PhD student in the Management of Organizations (Macro) track at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley. Her research broadly explores the structure of networks and their influence on organizational outcomes, with a recent focus on the network antecedents of identity and discourse. Prior to joining UC Berkeley, she earned her master’s in Computer Science at Purdue University (West Lafayette, Indiana, US). In her free time, she enjoys playing squash and pickleball, and exploring new restaurants.

Chloe Zhao

​Chloe Zhao is a PhD student in Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Yankai Wang

Yankai Wang is a PhD student in Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, with interests in collaboration and coordination, computational social science, collective dynamics, and organization design. His research explores how people work together in complex organizational settings and how structures and interactions shape group outcomes. Before starting his PhD in 2024, he worked as a Research Fellow at Stanford GSB.

Yutao Chen

​Yutao Chen is a PhD student in the MORS–Macro group at the Berkeley Haas School of Business, starting in Fall 2023. Before beginning his doctoral studies, he worked as a Research Associate at Harvard D³’s Platform Lab. He holds a master’s degree in Computational Social Science (MACSS) from the University of Chicago. Outside of research, Yutao enjoys music as a way to explore creativity and connect with others. 

ZIWEN CHEN

​Ziwen Chen is a PhD student in Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a member of the Computational Culture Lab, working with Prof. Amir Goldberg and Prof. Douglas Guilbeault. Her research explores the interplay between markets and culture, focusing on how market logic reshapes the way individuals understand themselves and others. She studies the historical diffusion of economic metaphors in public discourse and is also interested in consumerism and cultural consumption. Methodologically, she uses computational approaches such as network analysis, natural language processing, and digital experiments.

Top row (from left to right): Julien Clement, ​Daniel Lobo, Chole Zhao, Sameer Srivastava, Ziwen Chen, Douglas Guilbeault, Amir Goldberg, Jingxin Yang, Yankai Wang
Bottom row (from left to right): Madison Haley Singell, Kara Luo, Danyang Li, Gaveal Fan, Sarayu Anshuman, Yutao Chen

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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Austin van Loon, Postdoctoral Associate, Duke University
Abraham Oshotse, Assistant Professor, Organization & Management, Goizueta Business School, Emory University
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
Lara Yang, Surge AI
Paul Vicinanza, Amazon