About

Li Zhang

Li Zhang joined the University of Virginia Law Library as Head of the Legal Data Lab in 2023 to support and promote empirical legal research. A computational social scientist by training, Li provides research support in various areas, including but not limited to data cleaning, modeling, natural language processing, social network analysis, cloud computing, web scraping, experimental design, and data visualization. His research interests include political communication, judicial behavior, and social psychology. Some of his past projects have been funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Feld Family Foundation, and the Rapoport Family Foundation.

Prior to joining UVA, Li was the Social Sciences and Data Librarian at Skidmore College. He was also affiliated with the Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering at Boston University. He is currently completing his Ph.D. dissertation on social bot detection and regulation.

Ruoyi Wu

Ruoyi Wu comes to us from the University of Chicago, where she served as a Large-Scale Computing Research Assistant, developing learning materials on scalable data analysis and accessible computing resources. She has applied her data science skills to projects with social and educational impact, including using machine learning to identify patterns in university scholarship grants and analyzing large-scale data to uncover geographic disparities in internet access. Ruoyi earned her M.A. in Computational Social Science from the University of Chicago in 2024, and her B.A. in Computer Science and in Sociology, magna cum laude, from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2022.

Sarah New

Sarah New joined the University of Virginia Law Library as Web Services Librarian in 2018. She holds a master’s degree in Geographic Information Systems, and happily shares her GIS skills with the Legal Data Lab.