Ruodan Zhang

Assistant Professor, Department of Public Policy

Primary Research Theme

People and the City

Secondary Research Themes

Social-Ecological Systems

Research Interests

Ruodan’s research interests include nonprofit management, volunteerism, and diversity in nonprofit organizations. Her broader research agenda centers on why citizens participate and persist in public affairs, and the corresponding roles of public and nonprofit organizations. Ruodan’s work explores the interaction between public funding and individual prosocial behaviors (donations and volunteering), public opinions and nonprofits’ advocacy-related work in issue areas such as identity diversity and climate change.

Recent Cities-Related Projects

• Public Opinion on Climate Change and Environmental Nonprofit Density: The nonprofit sector has been an integral part of the solution to address wicked problems such as climate change. This project explores the relationship between public opinion on climate change and the density of U.S. environmental nonprofits at county level from 2014 to 2019.
• Government Grants and Nonprofits’ Use of Volunteers: This project explores how government grants to nonprofit organizations lead to an unintended effect on nonprofits’ organizational use of volunteers.
• Nonprofit Identification Methods with Word Embedding: To better understand the U.S. nonprofit sector, this project develops a new text-as-data workflow for identifying nonprofit organizations using their mission and activity information reported in the IRS Form 990s in 2010-2016.