Yulin hopes to attain a faculty position at a large research university where she can continue having a scientific and educational impact by using big data and artificial intelligence techniques to investigate gender inequality in knowledge creation and innovation. 

Yulin Yu is a PhD student in the School of Information at U-M. Previously, she graduated from Indiana University Bloomington with a bachelor’s degree in journalism, art history, and informatics. At U-M, Yulin’s research leverages big data, artificial intelligence, and network science to investigate the drivers of innovation across a range of contexts. Her current dissertation work focuses on understanding how scientific innovation can advance through the novel use of ‘big data’ and how researchers can automate innovation via predicting the need or use of novel datasets. Her contributions to innovation-related research extend to the impact of external shocks on organizational innovation dynamics, gender differences in research recognition, and the relationship between novelty and popularity in music.

CEW+ supported Yulin’s project titled “Understanding Global Gender Disparity Trends in Wikipedia.” The project gathers millions of biographical articles from Wikipedia to quantify gender disparities in articles about individuals from traditionally underrepresented groups, including women.

Yulin is passionate about diversity, inclusion, equity, and women’s rights. Though she grew up in a sexist environment, she was able to become the first in her family and the first woman in her home country in China to pursue a PhD. One of her mentors writes that Yulin is “an unstoppable force, unafraid of challenges and capable of overcoming any obstacles.” After graduation, Yulin hopes to attain a faculty position at a large research university where she can continue having a scientific and educational impact by using big data and artificial intelligence techniques to investigate gender inequality in knowledge creation and innovation.

CEW+ is inspired by Yulin’s unwavering advocacy for underrepresented people and names her a Riecker Graduate Student Research Fellow.