Yujun Zhou profile

Portfolio

Yujun Zhou

Data scientist and AI product builder

Economist by training, product thinker by practice. I bridge technology, data, and business, using data science and generative AI to reason, prototype, and build. Formerly at Meta learning how technology works at scale, now applying that perspective at Annalect and beyond.

Three working strengths

  • Economic thinking for causal, incentive-aware analysis
  • Data thought leadership that shapes product and strategy decisions
  • End-to-end data product building across modeling, backend, and UX

What people say

Consistent excellence in analytics work, with strong influence skills, operational rigor, and a high bar for data-driven decision making.

Former manager, Instagram Relevance Analytics

An amazing tech lead and one of the best data scientists I had the chance to work with.

Data science colleague

Always impressed by Yujun’s analytical skills and insights. Any team would be lucky to have him.

Engineering manager

Played an incredible role supporting the team with strong technical skills and thoughtful partnership.

Machine learning engineer

Toolkit

The capabilities I reach for most

Selected work

Built, tested, and written for real decisions

Debrief

A FastAPI and React voice app for turning quick voice logs into a useful record of the day and week. It transcribes and classifies captures, surfaces daily and weekly AI reviews, tracks open loops, and helps users recover thoughts, tasks, recurring themes, and patterns over time.

  • React
  • FastAPI
  • TypeScript
  • PostgreSQL
  • OpenAI

ChurchMap

A technical church discovery app that combines first-visit geolocation with a Leaflet/OpenStreetMap interface to make nearby church search automatic and easy. It enriches church profiles by extracting Google Places review, photo, rating, hours, and contact data, then uses computed tags and review signals to make the results more useful than a plain directory.

  • React
  • Leaflet
  • FastAPI
  • SQLite
  • Google Places API

Writing

Research and published work

2022

Machine learning for food security: Principles for transparency and usability

Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy 44 (2), 893-910

54 citations

2019

A data-driven approach improves food insecurity crisis prediction

World Development 122, 399-409

138 citations

2020

Effects of stockholding policy on maize prices: Evidence from Zambia

Journal of Agricultural & Food Industrial Organization 18 (1), 20190057

3 citations

Contact