Sam Zhang

Bio: I am a 5th year PhD candidate in applied mathematics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and advised by Aaron Clauset. My research applies a wide range of techniques from data science — from statistics and mathematical modeling to surveys and experimentation — toward the study of complex social systems, ranging from academic careers to human rights. During my PhD, I was a two-time research intern with the Microsoft Research NYC Computational Social Science group and a Data Science & Human Rights Fellow with the Human Rights Data Analysis Group. Previously, I worked as a software consultant at Pivotal Labs, a software engineer at multiple startups including on a DARPA project, and as a Data Science for Social Good Fellow at the University of Chicago.

Talk Title: Labor advantages drive the greater productivity of faculty at elite universities

Abstract: Faculty at prestigious institutions dominate scientific discourse, producing a disproportionate share of all research publications. Environmental prestige can drive such epistemic disparity, but the mechanisms by which it causes increased faculty productivity remain unknown. Here, we combine employment, publication, and federal survey data for 78,802 tenure-track faculty at 262 PhD-granting institutions in the American university system to show through multiple lines of evidence that the greater availability of funded graduate and postdoctoral labor at more prestigious institutions drives the environmental effect of prestige on productivity. In particular, greater environmental prestige leads to larger faculty-led research groups, which drive higher faculty productivity, primarily in disciplines with group collaboration norms. In contrast, productivity does not increase substantially with prestige for faculty publications without group members or for group members themselves. The disproportionate scientific productivity of elite researchers can be largely explained by their substantial labor advantage rather than inherent differences in talent.