Latest Group of Social Science PhD Grads Destined for Greatness

Today Caltech hosts its 130th commencement ceremony, and the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences is proud to present our latest graduates from the social sciences PhD program. Please join us in applauding them for their academic achievements and wishing the best for the entire class of 2024!

Wanying (Kate) Huang receives her PhD this month after successfully defending her dissertation, Essays on Rational Social Learning, with Omer Tamuz as her advisor. She was the recipient of both the Roger and Marjorie Davisson Graduate Fellowship and the Repetto-Figueroa Family Graduate Fellowship in 2021–2022. This fall, Huang moves to Australia to start her career as a senior lecturer in economics (assistant professor equivalent) at Monash University.

Joanna Huey graduates after defending her thesis, Institutional Design of Criminal Justice Processes, with Alex Hirsch as her advisor. Among other honors, she received the HSS Brass Division Award for Teaching (teaching assistant) in 2019 and the John O. Ledyard Prize for Graduate Research in Social Science in 2019 for joint work with Jeffrey Zeidel (PhD '23). She also received the Stephen A. Ross Memorial Fellowship in 2020–2021. Huey will join the department of political science and international relations at the University of Southern California as an assistant professor.

Shunto Kobayashi's research examines the effects of market mechanisms and information structures on firms' strategic behaviors, especially within digital markets. Last month, he completed his dissertation, Essays in Empirical Industrial Organization, with Yi Xin as his advisor. The Linde Institute Graduate Fellowship recipient (2020–2021 and 2021–2022) will join the Questrom School of Business at Boston University as an assistant professor of marketing in the fall.

Zhuofang Li is interested in computational social science, and her research focuses on building scalable tools for analyzing large-scale social science data with the help of cutting-edge techniques in computer science and applied mathematics. Li graduates this month after defending her thesis, Essays on Trustworthy Online Platforms, with Michael Alvarez as her advisor, having held the Citadel Global Fixed Income Graduate Fellowship during the last year of her studies at Caltech. She will be a machine learning engineer at Google after commencement.

As a graduate student in HSS, Po-Hsuan Lin received the John O. Ledyard Prize for Graduate Research in Social Science (2021), the Roger and Marjorie Davisson Graduate Fellowship (2021–2022), the James and Karen Gerard Fellowship in Social Sciences (2022–2023), and a grant from the National Science Foundation for "Doctoral Dissertation Research in Economics: Two Experiments on the Behavioral Equivalence of Dirty Faces Games." He earns his PhD after completing his dissertation, Essays in Behavioral Game Theory Solution Concepts, with Thomas Palfrey as his advisor. Lin will be an assistant professor of economics at the University of Virginia in the fall.

After commencement, Aldo Lucia will join the faculty at The Ohio State University as an assistant professor of economics. Last month, he defended his thesis, An Experimental and Theoretical Investigation of Decision-Making Under Risk, with Charlie Sprenger as his advisor. Lucia was the recipient of the Lance E. Davis Fellowship for 2020–2021, the Stephen A. Ross Memorial Fellowship for 2021–2022, and a grant from the National Science Foundation for "Doctoral Dissertation Research in Economics: Expected Utility Core of Risk Preferences" in 2023.