Current Research Projects

  • Interested in learning more about how to apply network analysis to topics in social and organizational psychology? We’re preparing studies on peer institution networks, faculty author networks, and shared leadership networks.

  • MFC measures have grown in popularity as an alternative to traditional Likert-type measures (scale of 1 to 5) that often suffer from faking, social desirability, and bias. These have primarily been developed for personality measures; we are looking to develop them for constructs such as leadership and vocational interests.

  • Multigroup Membership multilevel models are designed to test datasets where individuals belong to two or more groups simultaneously. Though originally designed for teams and education research (e.g., employees with 2+ bosses; students in 2+ classrooms), we would like to apply this to multiracial individuals (i.e., individuals with 2+ racial identities).

  • NLP methods have grown tremendously in recent years, especially in psychology. We have several projects applying NLP to different contexts, such as analyzing transcripts from reality TV shows to predict performance and analyzing leadership measures.

  • GPT and other large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for data generation, analysis, and experimentation. We have several projects looking to implement GPT in research areas such as leadership development, generating leadership data, and more.

  • Recent scholars have raised concerns over our field’s over-reliance on surveys and lab experiments that suffer from low generalizability to the real-world. We would like to build “high-fidelity” in-person simulation experiences to assess leadership, teamwork, and communication. This includes game design, physical setup to maximize real-world applicability, and use of technology for dense data collection (e.g., video and audio).

  • Are you interested in surveys of how college students view their campus climate, and how that changes over time? We have access to large datasets that could be cleaned, analyzed, and connected to other interesting datasets (e.g., public news reports on campus crises).

Prior Research

The STATS Lab at CMC launched in July 2025. Prior research projects led by Dr. Zhou during his time at George Mason University can be found at his personal website.

Use the tag cloud below to explore blog posts about research conducted by the STATS Lab at CMC and other related research studies that might be of interest. You can also use the expandable accordion index further below to find specific published studies. Feel free to contact us with any questions!

  • I’m thrilled to announce my first book published with Cambridge University Press, coming in July 2025! The book is an anthology of narratives of people navigating their first jobs as they embark on their careers, paired with a review of the career counseling literature designed to help today’s job seekers in their career journeys. We hope that this book becomes an impactful resource for job seekers from all background, industries, and life stages as they begin their career journeys. You can order here using the discount code FRFJC25 for 20% off, or find it on Amazon.

  • This study focused on demonstrating how multiple facets of well-being — ranging from leadership to grit — matter in college student life. We collected data from over 5,000 college students linking self-report well-being surveys to data on their time spent on campus, course attendance, grades, and more. Find out more about the study here, or you can read the full research paper here!