Amy X. Zhang

Amy X. Zhang is an Associate Professor at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, where she leads the Social Futures Lab. She specializes in social computing, human-computer interaction, and artificial intelligence, focusing on designing and constructing systems to improve governance, collaboration, and content moderation in online communities. Her research covers participatory governance, personalized content filtering, and the sociotechnical infrastructure that supports online communities. She earned her Ph.D. from MIT, where she received the George Sprowls Award for the best Ph.D. thesis, and she is a former postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University. Her work has been honored with multiple awards, including the Sloan Research Fellowship, NSF CAREER Award, Google Research Scholar Award, and several best paper awards at top academic conferences.

• 2020-Present·Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington·Associate Professor
  • Leads the Social Futures Lab, focusing on democratic governance of online communities and personalized social platform design.
• 2019-2020·Computer Science Department, Stanford University·Postdoctoral Researcher
  • Studied participatory governance and content management systems.
• 2013-2019·Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), MIT·Ph.D. Researcher
  • Conducted research on human curatorial systems and developed tools for online communities.
• 2017·Microsoft Research·Research Intern
  • Developed a Slack chat application for annotating and summarizing chat logs.
• 2016·Google Research·Research Intern
  • Researched post categorization and user behavior modeling in online forums.

• 2014-2019·Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)·Ph.D.
  • Focused on content moderation systems for online communities in computer science.
• 2012-2013·University of Cambridge·M.Phil.
  • Conducted research on modeling geographic neighborhoods in computer science.
• 2007-2011·Rutgers University·B.S.
  • Majored in computer science with minors in economics and mathematics. Served as captain of the university's tennis team and won multiple awards.

• 2025: Sloan Research Fellowship
• NSF CAREER Award
• Google Research Scholar Award
• Best Paper Awards at ACM CHI and ACM CSCW
• George Sprowls Award for Best Ph.D. Thesis at MIT
• Gates Cambridge Scholarship at the University of Cambridge
• NSF Graduate Research Fellowship