Li Zhang oversees the Legal Data Lab, where he supports and promotes empirical legal research. A computational social scientist by training, Zhang provides research support in various areas such as data cleaning, modeling, natural language processing, social network analysis, cloud computing, web scraping, experimental design and data visualization. His research interests include political communication, judicial behavior and social psychology. Some of his past projects were funded by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Feld Family Foundation and Rapoport Family Foundation.
Before joining UVA Law, Zhang was the social sciences and data librarian at Skidmore College. He was also affiliated with the Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering at Boston University. He is completing his Ph.D. at Boston University on social bot detection and regulation.