Department of Sociology

Han Zhang is the Young Family Assistant Professor of Sociology and International and Public Affairs at Brown University. He obtained his Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University and his bachelor’s in computer science and B.A. in sociology from Peking University. He previously taught at HKUST and worked as a research intern at Microsoft Research in New York City and Asia.

He is a political sociologist and computational social scientist whose research examines how digital surveillance technologies influence social movements, state–society relations, and governance in authoritarian regimes, particularly in China. To study these questions, he uses computer vision and deep learning to construct large-scale datasets on protests in China from social media and on global surveillance camera densities from street-view imagery. He also develops statistical methods and, more recently, explores how generative AI can support quantitative social science research.