Professional Bio

Yang Yang is a dual-title Ph.D. candidate in Political Science and Social Data Analytics at Penn State University. His research examines how elite incentives, domestic institutions, and public opinion interact to shape international relations, with particular attention to foreign lobbying, diplomacy, signaling, and crisis bargaining. Methodologically, he draws on observational data, experimental designs, machine learning, and geo-coded data analysis to study the political foundations and consequences of foreign policy statecraft— how governments select, combine, and leverage coercive and cooperative tools to influence other states, and how these choices in turn affect political survival.

He is the recipient of the Milton B. Dolinger Graduate Fellowship from the College of the Liberal Arts at Penn State (2025–2026) and previously held the Program in Empirical International Relations (PEIR) Fellowship (2024–2025). He earned an M.A. in Politics from New York University and holds a B.A. from China and an M.Sc. from Singapore. Before graduate school, Yang worked as a policy analyst in Shanghai and as a regional journalist based in Bangkok.