Welcome!
Hi, I am BK Lee, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at New York University, and a co-Director of the Networks in Context lab.
I study social cohesion and network dynamics, exploring their impacts on individual, community, and societal well-beings in the domains of health and politics. I am also interested in using large language models, surveys, and social media data to develop indicators of social cohesion and polarization, predict public opinion, and simulate AI agents for advancing social science research.
My research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institues of Health, Russel Sage Foundation, and others. My work has appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Science Advances, JAMA Network Open and several other outlets.
I support open science: you can find my codes and data under research, or dataverse. Here’s a link to my CV.
News
May 2025. I’m super excited to work as PI on the two-year project, “The Effects of the 2023 Supreme Court Ruling to Ban Race-Conscious Admissions on College Presentation Strategies” with Maria Abascal and Tiffany Huang, funded by the Russel Sage Foundation!
May 2025. My paper on the unemployment and suicide received an Honorable Mention for the Best Publication Award from the Section on the Sociology of Mental Health, American Sociological Association!
November 2024. My paper on the unemployment and suicide is now published at American Sociological Review. You can download the paper here.
October 2024. I will work as Consulting Editor for the American Journal of Sociology for the next two years.
September 2024. I was very excited to work as co-PI on the five-year project “Social Cohesion in Action: How Collectivist and Interdependent Communities React to Adverse Events” (PI: Baldassarri), funded by the DOD Minerva Program. But, it is now being canceled.
August 2024. I had the honor of revising the 5th edition of a Korean textbook on social network analysis—the very book that sparked my own interest in the field. You can order the book here.
August 2024. I’m excited to work as co-Investigator on the three-year project, “Exploring the Co-evolutionary Dynamics of Artificial Intelligence and Society: A Computational Social Science Approach” (PI: Jeon June), funded by the National Research Foundation of Korea.
December 2023. My paper on the patterns of social networks during COVID-19 is published at Science Advances! Check this out!
Contact
Email : bklee@nyu.edu