Minda Belete
Research Assistant
Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Education: BA, Economics, New York University Abu Dhabi
Research Areas: Computational Socioeconomics, Urban Economics, Labor Economics, Migration, Gender Research, Computational Social Science
Minda Belete is a research assistant at NYU Abu Dhabi working in computational social science, focusing on economic and social phenomena. His research interests include urban economics, gender studies, labor mobility, and migration, examining micro-level factors that influence social and economic trends. He works at the intersection of technology, society, and data science, using textual datasets — from historical archives and policy documents to media reports and social media — to identify patterns in human behavior and biases for policy analysis. His work employs natural language processing and large language models to explore the social, economic, and historical foundations of cultures, beliefs, and behaviors.
Research
Currently, as a research assistant at New York University Abu Dhabi, I explore micro-level causes of social and economic trends through multiple projects: modeling trajectories of notable individuals under Etienne Wasmer; investigating the pink tax with Samreen Malik; studying labor mobility with Etienne Wasmer; and examining forces influencing city locations with Etienne Wasmer. I leverage natural language processing and machine learning to extract structured data from large text corpora — including historical archives, biographies, and academic literature — to analyze behavioral patterns, biases, human mobility, and socioeconomic dynamics. Additionally, I use high-performance computing for scalable extraction of empirical knowledge from unstructured big-text data, linking these insights to key economic and social variables.