Postdoctoral Fellows

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  Ming Wei

  Ming Wei's research interests focus on electricity markets, low-carbon transitions, green finance, and financial econometrics. Previously, he worked as a research fellow at the Fintech Center of Zhejiang Lab, where he explored the interplay between green finance and decarbonization. Ming holds a Ph.D. from Macquarie Business School in Australia. His dissertation investigates the renewable transformation of electricity markets in changing environmental environments.
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  Yin Yuan

  Yin Yuan is a postdoctoral researcher at the China Data Lab at the UC San Diego, where she also earned her Ph.D. Her research explores the intersection of propaganda and elite politics in China. One line of her work examines how the state uses institutional mechanisms to replicate their messages across media platforms--including commercial newspapers, the internet, and even large language models (LLMs). Another line of research, including her dissertation, investigates the role of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) official discourse in intra-elite communication and develops methods to automatically identify political catchphrases (tifa), the building blocks of CCP discourse, and to interpret their political and policy implications.

Past Postdoctoral Fellows

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  Patrick J. Chester

  Patrick Chester is a postdoctoral researcher at the China Data Lab at UC San Diego. He received his Ph.D. in political science from New York University. His dissertation demonstrates a new method to measure propaganda using word embeddings and applies it towards determining whether a specific rhetorical strategy is being employed by Chinese state media. His research focuses on quantifying how China and other autocracies utilize propaganda in traditional and social media by applying text as data and machine learning tools towards the measurement of political science concepts.
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  Michael Thompson-Brusstar

  Michael Thompson-Brusstar is a postdoctoral fellow at 21CCC and received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Michigan. His research focuses on the evolution of China's administrative and legal systems, with a special focus on the politics of bureaucracy and the use of political text to study policy change. His published work has focused on the relationship between the party and state in China, the changing role of China's public prosecutor, and the politics of administrative supervision. His current projects focus on the role of study teams in international policy learning, the role of organizational policy in China's reform era political-economy, and on validating large-scale digitization processes for historical text data.