Zehua Li

My research stands at the intersection of law, AI, and local governance. I use computational methods to identify policy interventions that promote grassroots civic participation. I am also interested in how we can use AI to foster more equitable K-12 education and close up government agencies’ policy-implementation gap.

As a computer science major at U-Michigan, I developed machine learning techniques for social good applications under the guidance of Prof. Rada Mihalcea. After graduation, I held a pre-doctoral research fellowship at Stanford Law School, where I applied NLP to the study of law, history, and public policy under Prof. Julian Nyarko’s mentorship. I then obtained my law degree from Stanford and am now a PhD student at Harvard’s Government Department and Kennedy School, where I am affiliated with the Institute for Quantitative Social Science and the Center for American Political Studies.

My interests in public service have led me to a range of experiences, from interning at The New York Times Beijing Bureau, to serving as Counsel to the Commissioner at Namibia’s national tax agency, and to pursuing free speech litigation at the Knight First Amendment Institute in New York. I also build the crowdsourcing news tracker Surge.fm (浪潮) and volunteered as a donkey handler at a community pasture in Palo Alto.

my cat natsume 夏目