Zheng Fu
Ph.D. Candidate
Research Associate
Research Areas
Organizations
Medical sociology
Social networks
Zheng Fu is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology whose research examines how professional communities coordinate collective decisions under conditions of uncertainty. Her work focuses on moments when established technologies or bodies of knowledge are abandoned, not as individual choices, but as socially embedded, networked processes shaped by professional norms, institutional structures, and peer influence.
Drawing on organizational sociology, the sociology of knowledge, and medical sociology, Zheng theorizes "collective abandonment" as a mechanism through which professional communities manage epistemic uncertainty and stabilize boundaries of expertise. Substantively, she examines how decisions to abandon medical technologies, protocols, and research trajectories emerge, diffuse, and consolidate within hospitals and intellectual communities, allowing her to compare how different institutional environments condition coordinated decision-making.
Methodologically, Zheng combines computational and quantitative methods, including social network analysis, text analysis, and agent-based modeling, with archival research.
Zheng holds a B.A. in History from Wuhan University, an M.A. in History from Peking University, and an M.Sc. in Computational Social Science from the Institute for Analytical Sociology at Linköping University.