Wayne Hsuan-Wei Lee
Assistant Professor, College of Health, Lehigh University
Hsuan-Wei "Wayne" Lee is an Assistant Professor of Biostatistics and Health Data Science in the College of Health at Lehigh University, with a faculty appointment in the Department of Mathematics. From 2019 to 2024 he was an Assistant Research Fellow at the Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica. During this period he also held adjunct appointments in political science and sociology and a joint appointment in physics at National Taiwan University. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
His research asks how data about people is produced, and what it does once it circulates. Using network science, statistical modeling, and machine learning, he studies how platforms and social structure shape the evidence that institutions rely on. He has written on political bots and opinion polarization in online networks, on large-scale Facebook data and the formation of social ties, and on the distribution of social capital and trust. As a co-investigator on projects funded by Taiwan's Ministry of Science and Technology, he studied how referral networks segregate minority workers in labor markets and helped build dynamic databases of online public opinion.
A second line of his work concerns measurement under unequal power: estimating the size of hidden and vulnerable populations while preserving anonymity, measuring agency among trafficking victims, and examining how transitional justice in Taiwan relates to health, happiness, and social solidarity. His current projects ask whether AI-generated synthetic respondents can stand in for real people in social surveys, and how disparities enter clinical decisions recorded in electronic health records.
He has published more than 40 peer-reviewed articles in journals including Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, Computers in Human Behavior, Social Science Computer Review, Social Networks, and Social Science & Medicine. He also serves as Lehigh University's representative to the United Nations through its ECOSOC consultative status.
Appearances
- How Biased AI Vaccine Information Deepens Health Inequity Across Communities of Unequal Trust（Presenter）