P.D. Soros Fellowship for New Americans

Jinyan Zang is working to ensure that digital technologies and innovations reflect American values. He identifies conflicts between technology and the nation's laws and traditions in areas such as privacy, equality, and fair elections, and looks for solutions in policy and design that ensure technological progress supports all Americans.

At the age of seven, Jinyan immigrated to the United States from China with his parents, who came for better work opportunities in Rochester, Minnesota, and, later, Boston. Growing up in a household of medical researchers, he gained an early appreciation for the power of science and how to establish new facts through scientific experiments.

As an undergraduate at Harvard University, Jinyan took a computer science course on privacy and technology that inspired him to focus his career on issues of technology policy. After college, he worked on issues of privacy and consumer protection as a research fellow in technology and data governance at the Federal Trade Commission and as the managing editor of Technology Science, an academic journal publishing research on technology's impact on society.

As a PhD candidate in government at Harvard, Jinyan is excited to continue working on integrating American values into new technologies.