Hi there :)
This is Zixuan Zhou. I’m a first-year master’s student in Computational Social Science (MACSS) at the University of Chicago. Before Chicago, I received my bachelor degrees in English and Economics from Peking University, China in 2024. I also spent an amzing quarter at the University of California, Los Angeles as an exchange student in the Fall of 2022.
Growing up in Nanjing and having spent my college days in Beijing and Los Angeles, I became inevitably facinated by cities - their structure, neighborhoods, and the way communities move. I want to understand how spatial structures influence social and economic ones. I also wish to explore inequalities that are unique to the urban setting, such as those in housing and education.
Currently, my research asks how school quality is “priced in” to housing markets, and how policies like school choice or redistricting ripple through urban dynamics by steering families’ location decisions. I constantly bring in new methods from computer and data science to faciliate my research.
Outside of academia, music, film, and literature keep me grounded. Throughout college I arranged music for SEABling, an amazing a cappella group of which I was a proud member. I still make music in my free time. I also enjoyed being an English major, writing short stories and doing literary projects on political science fiction and, unsurprisingly, Virginia Woolf.
Thanks for stopping by. Feel free to explore or say hi!
