Minghong Shen 沈明宏
Minghong Shen is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Population Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania and a Research Collaborator at the Center for Applied Social and Economic Research (CASER) at NYU Shanghai. His research interests include early childhood development, education, urban studies, artificial intelligence, and computational social science. He received his PhD from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2025 and previously held a postdoctoral appointment at NYU Shanghai.
Background
Appointments
2026–present
Postdoctoral Fellow
Population Studies Center, University of Pennsylvania
2025–26
Postdoctoral Fellow in Social Science
New York University Shanghai
2025
Visiting Scholar
Population Studies Center, University of Pennsylvania
2018–19
Research Assistant in Social Science
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Education
2021–25
PhD, Urban Governance and Design
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
2019–21
MPhil, Social Science
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
2017–18
MSc, Global China Studies
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
2014–18
BA, Social Work (with honours)
Minor in Sociology, Nanjing University
Research Interests
Understanding how families, institutions, and environments shape unequal life chances.
01
Socioeconomic and gender disparities, shaped by families, institutions, and neighborhoods.
Resources
Open materials for social scientists working with R, Stata, and AI tools.
Reference book
Nearly 1,800 paired Stata–R examples across 41 chapters, in English and Chinese.
R package
Stata-inspired functions with tidyverse-style operations for exploring and preparing data.
Textbook · English · In development
A 28-chapter introduction to R, tidystata, and the tidyverse for social-science data preparation, visualization, and regression.
Guide · Chinese
Setting up Claude Code and other agentic AI tools for research in R, Stata, and Python.
Workshop
R Workshops for Social Scientists
A bilingual course series on R for social science research, with practical exercises.