Fanqi Zeng

I am a UKRI Metascience AI Early Career Fellow (Principal Investigator) in the Department of Sociology and a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. I am also a Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute and a Research Fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at Oxford. My research bridges AI and the social sciences, harnessing computational methods and large-scale data to illuminate patterns within complex societal and natural systems. My current work explores the transformative impact of AI on society and human behaviour. My work has been funded by UKRI and the John Fell Fund.

Prior to my current role, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the same department, working in parallel on the Wellcome Trust-funded FORESFA project on global substandard and falsified medicines and the European Research Council-funded CrimGov project on global organised crime and governance. My research has appeared in leading interdisciplinary journals, including Science, Nature Cities, Nature Communications, PNAS, and PNAS Nexus.

I hold a PhD in Engineering Mathematics from the University of Bristol, completed under the supervision of Professors Thilo Gross, Martin Homer, and Nikolai Bode. My doctoral research combined top-down (model-driven) and bottom-up (data-driven) approaches, drawing on machine learning, agent-based modelling, and network science to investigate complex systems.

Beyond my research, I have taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses in sociology, mathematics, and computer science at Oxford and Bristol. I supervise MSc and MPhil students in the Department of Sociology and serve as a college advisor at Oxford. I sit on the editorial board of Applied Spatial Analysis and Policy and review for journals such as Nature, Theory and Society, Scientific Reports, and Population Studies, as well as for funding bodies including UKRI, the Software Sustainability Institute, and the Oxford Social Sciences Engagement Fellowship.