Simone Zhang
Appointment
CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar 2025-2027
Innovation, Equity, & The Future of Prosperity
About
Simone Zhang studies how organizations make decisions that affect people’s life chances and access to opportunity. Her research focuses on the impacts of emerging technologies like predictive modeling and generative AI on who gets what in society, especially in social policy and law. Combining qualitative, quantitative, and computational methods, she aims to understand how these innovations shape how people are evaluated and how they affect relationships between organizations and the communities they serve. Her research has examined how pretrial risk assessment algorithms shape courtroom practices, how public organizations allocate scarce resources, and how the public responds to institutional uses of predictive modeling.
Awards
- Prize Fellowship in the Social Sciences, Princeton University, 2019-2021
- Anna and G. Mason Morfit ’97 Fellowship, Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science and Public Policy, Princeton University, 2017-2018
Relevant Publications
- Simone Zhang, Janet Xu, and AJ Alvero. (2025). Generative AI Meets Open-Ended Survey Responses: Research Participant Use of AI and Homogenization. Sociological Methods and Research, OnlineFirst.
- Simone Zhang and Rebecca A. Johnson. (2023). Hierarchies in the Decentralized Welfare State: Prioritization in the Housing Choice Voucher Program. American Sociological Review, 88(1), 114–153.
- Rebecca A. Johnson and Simone Zhang. (2022). What is the Bureaucratic Counter- factual? Categorical versus Algorithmic Prioritization in U.S. Social Policy. In 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT ’22), June 21–24, 2022.