Welcome to my website!
I am Si, a 5th-year PhD Candidate in Political Science at Boston University. My research interests include comparative politics, authoritarianism, political economy, development, gender, China, and political methodologies. I am committed to creating a better U.S.-China relationship – a pressing global issue, in my view – through my dissertation. My research has been supported by the Hariri Institute for Computing, the Global Development Policy Center, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, and the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University.
My dissertation, “From Control to Choice: Women, Work, and Power in China's New Birth Planning Regime”, will explore the politics and economic consequences of the end of China's one-child policy. My dissertation committee members are Rachel Brulé, Joseph Fewsmith, Taylor Boas, and Susan Greenhalgh (Harvard University).
I received my Bachelor's Degree in Physics from Imperial College London, U.K., and a Master's Degree in Journalism from Northeastern University.
During the fall of 2019, I worked as an intern at the Harvard Data Science Review, where I designed and developed data visualization to effectively communicate data science concepts.
During the summer of 2019, I worked for the MGGG Redistricting Lab, where I conducted research on the mathematics of gerrymandering by applying data science to social and political problems. While there, I coauthored "Geometry of Graph Partitions Via Optimal Transport", a paper supervised by Justin Solomon at MIT.
Prior to that, I was a data researcher for Northeastern's School of Journalism. A highlight of my experience there is a Twitter sentiment analysis project - "Democrats 'went low' on Twitter leading up to 2018" - that got published on news publication Roll Call.
At Imperial College London, I conducted various computing, laboratory and research projects collaboratively and solved challenging physics, math and statistical questions. My experience studying and working in the U.K., China and the U.S. has also provided me with a global perspective, a valuable skill in today’s highly-interconnected world.
Outside my work, I like to cook, travel, hike, and practice yoga.
Blog posts
Summer in the Field: Women, Work and Politics in China's New Era of Family Planning. Published with BU Global Development Policy (GDP) Center.
Academic papers
Geometry of Graph Partitions via Optimal Transport. SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing. (With Tara Abrishami, Nestor Guillen, Parker Rule, Zachary Schutzman, Justin Solomon, and Thomas Weighill.) ArXiv: 1910.09618.
Democrats "went low" on Twitter leading up to 2018. Roll Call. (With Aleszu Bajak.)
Renewable energy is the future. So why are we still stuck in the past? WGBH.
What I learned applying data science to U.S. redistricting. Storybench.
How to build a heatmap in Python. Storybench.
The future of machine learning in journalism. Storybench.
Carlos Scheidegger on why data science needs to be done humanely. Storybench.
Takeaways on being a watchdog reporter from the 2018 Boston Watchdog Workshop. Storybench.
How Florida Today created an augmented reality rocket launch app. Storybench.
Doctoral students return home for summer research - Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Boston University
Graduate Student Fellow Hopes to Apply Data Journalism Skills to Study Inequalities - Hariri Institute for Computing, Boston University
Democrats who won 2018 midterms were more negative than Republicans on Twitter, research finds - News@Northeastern, Northeastern University
Si Wu, Journalism graduate student, uses data to help others understand political redistricting - College of Arts, Media and Design, Northeastern University