Yutong Zhu | University of Chicago

About Me

I am Yutong (Max) Zhu, a Sociology Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago, where I work at the Knowledge Lab. I am advised by James Evans, John Levi Martin, and Bernard Koch. I hold an M.A. in Computational Social Science from UChicago (2025) and a B.S. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University with an Additional Major in History (2022). My solo-authored paper, “Explaining Gendered Language Through Embedding Approximation: How ‘Stupid’ Became a Man’s Word,” is currently revise and resubmit at Social Forces, and I have other ongoing work in computational narratology, AI auditing, stratification, and opinion measurement using large language models. For more information, please refer to my CV.

Research Interests

Sociology of Culture: language, word embedding, pragmatism, cultural cognition, identity, ideology
Computational Social Science: mechanistic interpretability, digital minds, representation, stratification, social simulation

Personal Progress

[Sep. 2023- Jun. 2025] Awarded University Scholar Full‐Tuition Scholarship from the University of Chicago.
[Jun. 2022 – Feb. 2023] Worked as a full-time Data Engineer at Stellar Cyber Sensor Team.
[May. 2022] Received the Ludwig Schaefer Award for Outstanding Achievement in History at Carnegie Mellon University.

Friends

Check out my friends: Jiayi Yuan and Hang Yin