About

TOO LEGIT TO OVERFIT

Zhang has a mixed bag of interests: political science, military affairs, history, science fiction, linguistics, film, video games, anime, and rock music. He hasn't found a single category for them yet.

Zhang does not believe in a free lunch. He has found few examples in the sample and therefore often skips lunch altogether. His diet is roughly 90% home cooking, 5% Tim Hortons, and 5% filed under "other."

Zhang also runs and cycles. He has explored much of Vancouver and knows UBC best. Run with the Wind and Nasu: Summer in Andalusia had something to do with his choice of sports.

Places I've run and cycled in Vancouver. From Iona Beach and Richmond to Grouse Mountain and Mount Seymour.

Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, CARTO

Zhang no longer disappears into video games as he did in high school. The latest exception was Death Stranding 2: On the Beach. He has since started making a game of his own. The project is not public. No Codec frequency has been assigned. Zhang accepts no liability for whether it ever ships.

Nathan wearing sunglasses beside a street railing in Hong Kong
A peculiar character
Nathan and his coauthor Jerrold Huang at the airport
With my coauthor Jerrold Huang

Experience

  1. ESG Research Analyst Co-op

    Sep 2026–Present

    British Columbia Investment Management Corporation (BCI)

    Capital Markets & Credit Investments: quantitative research and portfolio environmental exposure

    • Apply causal ML to study governance risk factors, including executive compensation, and financial performance for fundamental investment research. Develop ML models to predict M&A and other corporate events.
    • Independently build reproducible Capital IQ and ISS ECA ETL in Databricks for proxy-voting research. Backtest coded strategies using simulated ballot-time information and analyze subsequent-risk correlations.
    • Assess portfolio environmental exposure using Net Purpose data.

  2. Research Assistant

    May–Aug 2026

    UBC Sauder School of Business

    Multimodal financial information extraction and analysis across media

    • I assessed RavenPack financial-news coverage against a ProQuest corpus of over 3.2 million articles, supporting research on financial information across media.
    • I independently built yt-dlp download and cleaning workflows for multimodal financial information extraction and analysis. These generate clean panels from metadata, archive and deduplicate video and audio, and verify subtitle availability.

  3. Research Assistant (Co-op)

    Apr 2026–Present

    UBC Sauder School of Business

    Labor economics and technological change

    • As the sole RA on a faculty-led study of age-biased technological change, I independently compare empirical measures and panel fixed-effects regression designs. I link the CPS labor survey, O*NET occupation database, and USPTO patent data to study wages and occupational sorting.
    • I construct PatentsBERTa measures, validate them with Qwen 3 and sampled manual reading, and fit weighted FE OLS/GMM models. I harmonized 60+ historical O*NET releases and use R and Python and HPC/Slurm for large-scale estimation and bootstrap inference, while maintaining the replication package and drafting the empirical section.

  4. Research Assistant

    Jan 2025–May 2026

    Vancouver School of Economics at UBC

    Data science notebooks, courseware, and workshops for economics and social science students

    Supervised by Jonathan Graves and Laura Nelson.

    • Through COMET and Praxis UBC, I developed and deployed notebooks and HTML courseware for economics and social science students, applying computer vision, NLI, and sentiment analysis to historical and economic research. I led proposals and built image-embedding and classification workflows.
    • I co-developed a zero-shot NLI tutorial with human-label validation and robustness checks, in first revision at Programming Historian, and designed and taught a computer vision workshop.

  5. Teaching Assistant

    Sep 2024–Aug 2025

    UBC Chinese Language Program

    Teaching, grading, and classroom support

    • I supported Chinese language courses, ran consistent grading protocols, and trained classroom volunteers.

  6. Export Specialist Intern

    Jul–Aug 2024

    Shanghai Yaohua Pilkington Glass Group（上海耀华皮尔金顿玻璃集团）

    Operations and export logistics

    • I prototyped an arrears tracking algorithm for overdue international accounts and supported shipment booking, inventory control, and customs paperwork.

Education and honors

The University of British Columbia

B.A., Combined Major in Economics and Statistics, Minor in Data Science

Sep 2023 to May 2028 / 93.5 / 100 cumulative average

Honors

  • Work Learn International Undergraduate Research Awards (WLIURA)2026
  • Economics Undergraduate Scholarship2025
  • Faculty of Arts International Student Scholarship2024, 2025

Coursework

My coursework spans advanced econometrics, causal methods, statistical learning, and time-series forecasting, with a mathematical foundation in probability, linear algebra, and computational optimization.

Full course list by term

2023/24 Winter Session

Term 1

Course
Principles of Microeconomics
Science and Society in the Contemporary World
Differential Calculus with Applications
Writing and Research in the Disciplines

Term 2

Course
Introduction to Systematic Program Design
Introduction to Data Science
Principles of Macroeconomics
Integral Calculus with Applications
Revolution!

2024/25 Winter Session

Term 1

Course
Introduction to Econometrics II
Calculus III
Introduction to Global Politics
Statistical Inference for Data Science

Term 2

Course
Programming, Problem Solving, and Algorithms
Introduction to Causal Methods
Mathematical Proof
Applied Linear Algebra

2025/26 Winter Session

Term 1

Course
Machine Learning and Data Mining
Honours Intermediate Microeconomic Analysis I
Honours Intermediate Macroeconomic Analysis I
Advanced Econometrics
Methods for Statistical Learning

Term 2

Course
Computational Optimization
Honours Intermediate Macroeconomics II
Introduction to Statistical Inference
Time Series and Forecasting

Summer Sessions

2024 Summer

Course
Introduction to Econometrics I
Matrix Algebra

2025 Summer

Course
Statistical Modelling for Data Science
Introduction to Probability

2026 Summer

Course
Cooperative Work Placement I

Hometown

I do not love this place, but Guilin is where I grew up. Below are the neighbourhoods I knew, the schools I attended, the lakes I walked around, and Yaoshan, where I once reached the summit and cried. This city holds my insecurity and the courage I found to leave it.

Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, CARTO