Ling Zhu received an MS in Statistics and a PhD in Sociology from Stanford University. Before joining CUHK she was a post-doctoral fellow at the Stanford Center for Poverty and Inequality. Her overarching research interests consist of two substantive topics and one methodological theme: (1) state governance in authoritarian regimes – how the bureaucratic organizations are structured and the bureaucrats are incentivized to maintain a delicate balance between political control (which requires power centralization) and regional development (which requires power de-centralization), (2) mechanisms of reproducing economic inequality, gender segregation, and family advantages/disadvantages in China and in the United States, and (3) understanding misuses of causal inference methodology. The substantive studies are unified by a sociological interest in understanding how political and social institutions work together to shape social structures and often built on newly available big data and state-of-the-art data analytics for causal inference, network analysis, and machine learning techniques. Specifically. her current research investigates mobility patterns in Chinese bureaucracy througn an institutional perspective. She finds that bureaucrats of different positions have distinct mobility patterns, based on which she further explores who, local political leaders or non-leader officials, are more influential in promoting economic growth in Chinese local governments. Her earlier studies analyze income returns to Party membership in China and its variation between 1988 and 2015. She is also working on a project about intergenerational occupation reproduction in the United States and how it relates to occupational gender segregation in the US between 1972 and 2018.