Yifan Qian

Research Assistant Professor in Science of Science and Innovation

Northwestern University

Professional Summary

I am currently a Research Assistant Professor at the CSSI, Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, United States. My research is broadly concerned with the science of science and innovation, and combines theories and methods from artificial intelligence, network science, data science, and social sciences. The general goal of my work is to measure and predict innovations in research institutions with large-scale data sets on scientific fundings, publications and their broad impacts on various facets of human society.

Email: yifan.qian1@kellogg.northwestern.edu

Interests

Science of science Innovation Computational social science Network science Machine learning Data science

Featured Publications

Visualizing the Broad Impact of Science and Science Funding with Funding the Frontier (Accepted in Principle) featured image

Nature Human Behaviour

Visualizing the Broad Impact of Science and Science Funding with Funding the Frontier (Accepted in Principle)

Sep 6, 2026 • 1 min read

The Rise of Large Language Models and the Direction and Impact of US Federal Research Funding featured image

PNAS

The Rise of Large Language Models and the Direction and Impact of US Federal Research Funding

Aug 11, 2026 • 1 min read

Figures as Interfaces: Toward LLM-Native Artifacts for Scientific Discovery featured image

arXiv

Figures as Interfaces: Toward LLM-Native Artifacts for Scientific Discovery

Apr 9, 2026 • 1 min read

SciSciGPT: Advancing Human-AI Collaboration in the Science of Science featured image

Nature Computational Science

SciSciGPT: Advancing Human-AI Collaboration in the Science of Science

Dec 9, 2025 • 1 min read

Tenure and Research Trajectories featured image

PNAS

Tenure and Research Trajectories

Jul 29, 2025 • 1 min read

InnovationInsights: A Visual Analytics Approach for Understanding the Dual Frontiers of Science and Technology featured image

TVCG

InnovationInsights: A Visual Analytics Approach for Understanding the Dual Frontiers of Science and Technology

Oct 25, 2023 • 1 min read

Geometric graphs from data to aid classification tasks with graph convolutional networks featured image

Patterns

Geometric graphs from data to aid classification tasks with graph convolutional networks

Apr 9, 2021 • 1 min read

Quantifying the alignment of graph and features in deep learning featured image

TNNLS

Quantifying the alignment of graph and features in deep learning

Jan 11, 2021 • 1 min read