Liana Lan, a 2nd- year Master of Public Policy student at Harris, is working with Harris Assistant Professor Shaoda Wang on a project that investigates the Revolving Door in China’s judicial system. They are quantifying the associated judicial, economic and welfare implications. Lan assists in constructing a dataset of China’s civil cases on a provincial level. Her fellowship consists of literature reviews, descriptive statistics, data scraping and text analysis.

Before coming to UChicago, Lan earned her BS degree in Economic Geography from the Chinese Academy of Science and was a student research assistant at the Lab of Regional Sustainable Development Modeling. Overall, Lan’s research interest lies in the various applications of data science and econometrics. She is also interested in spatial analysis and applications of GIS.

“It’s such a great honor to work with such a wise and achieved young economist like Prof. Wang! He enlightened me to how data science could help investigate problems in political economics. This fellowship also enables me to enhance my skills of handling large-scale text data with Python. So far, the experience is a fabulous adventure for me and a precious opportunity to touch the frontier of economics and computational social sciences.”