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Oscar J. Mayorga
Director of AI & Computational Social Science
Oscar is a computational social scientist. He holds a PhD in Sociology from UCLA, with specialisations in race and ethnicity and in quantitative and computational methods. His research examines how racial ideologies, from colorblindness to meritocracy and market-fairness beliefs, shape political economy and social policy, combining survey analysis, computational text analysis, agent-based and system-dynamics simulation, and policy microsimulation.
He has led research non-profits in the United States, raising more than US$8 million across foundations including Gates, Lumina, Marguerite Casey, and Packard, and directing instrument design, data management, partner relationships, and teams across concurrent projects. His work appears in venues including Critical Sociology and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and he works in R, Python, Stata, and SQL, building reproducible, openly documented research pipelines. At Residua he leads the computational and methodological programme, contributing to the Institute's European Research Council and Horizon Europe applications.
Computational social scienceAgent-based & microsimulationPolitical economyResponsible AI
ORCID 0000-0002-5299-8955 · LinkedIn
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Daniel Y. Zipp
Director of Sociology, Ethics & Public Engagement
Daniel directs the Institute's social theory, research ethics, and public engagement, studying how knowledge claims are produced, validated, and contested, and how findings move responsibly into public life. He holds a PhD in Sociology from UCLA, where his dissertation examined how Chinese officials implement, and fail to implement, environmental policies. His fieldwork combines ethnographic, interview, archival, and quantitative methods in Mandarin Chinese and English, including interviews with 148 participants, among them government officials, workers, managers, and NGO staff in China's coal-based economies. His research spans environmental governance, collective action and labour mobilisation, and the life and death of urban neighbourhoods, from American Chinatowns to gentrifying cities.
He has held faculty appointments at the University of Maryland, College Park, as a Collegiate Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor in University Honors with an affiliate appointment in Sociology, and at Oberlin College, and served as inaugural Instructor of the UCLA–National Taiwan University Summer Institute in Taipei. His work appears in venues including City & Community and the Global Labour Journal, and he has presented research on five continents, including invited talks at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. His teaching and mentorship have been recognised with UCLA Sociology's Excellence in Teaching Award and the Silton Undergraduate Research Mentorship Award.
Sociology of knowledgeEthnographyResearch ethicsGlobal China
ORCID 0000-0001-8285-0831 · dyzipp.com · LinkedIn
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Gazmend Elezi
Scientific Director, Archaeology & Analytical Chemistry
Gazmend directs the laboratory programme, generating and grounding the chemistry: organic-residue, isotope, and proteomic data from archaeological material. He leads the Institute's mass-spectrometry methods and their integration with social and computational research.
Gazmend is a postdoctoral scholar at the Pasarow Mass Spectrometry Laboratory, Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He holds a PhD in Archaeology from UCLA and earlier degrees in prehistoric archaeology and art history from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. His work develops and applies mass-spectrometry methods, including LC-MS and GC-MS, to read the molecular traces preserved in archaeological materials, from organic food residues and ancient wine biomarkers to natural asphalt on Neolithic pottery and ancient proteins in fossil bone.
Alongside his archaeological science, he contributes to biomedical proteomics at UCLA and trains graduate and undergraduate researchers in mass-spectrometry technique. His publications appear in venues including Analytical Chemistry, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.
Biomolecular archaeologyMass spectrometryAnalytical chemistry
ORCID 0000-0003-4087-3431 · Google Scholar · ResearchGate · Web of Science