Linda Zhao is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Cornell Population Center. Her research centers on networks and neighborhoods, especially in how they relate to inequality and intergroup dynamics in three substantive areas: immigrant integration, policing, and health. As a computational social scientist, she analyzes networks and longitudinal data using a wide range of quantitative methods, such as agent-based models, marginal structural models, and statistical network models. Some examples of her recent work include a study on the origins of ethnic homophily in adolescent friendship networks, a study on the implications of neighborhood-level inequality for mortality, and a study on the relationship between officer networks and police misconduct. Prior to her postdoctoral work, she earned a PhD from Harvard in Sociology in 2020, a master's in Statistics from Harvard in 2017, and a bachelor's in Economics from Princeton in 2013.