SICSS-Atlanta

Kat Albrecht

Kat Albrecht is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University. Dr. Albrecht’s work sits at the intersection of computational social science and law, where she uses innovative computational techniques to study fear, violence, and data distortions. She is particularly interested in the nexus of fear and risk-taking behaviors, digital trace data, and the impact of law on decision-making. She frequently serves as a computational science expert for the defense on active legal cases about life without the opportunity of parole, felony murder, gang enhancements, and tribal jurisdiction.

Cynthia Searcy

Cynthia Searcy is Associate Dean of Academic Innovation and Strategy and Clinical Associate Professor of Public Management and Policy at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies. She leads efforts in the college to elevate the use of data science in policymaking. Dr. Searcy builds curricula to develop skills in computational social science to harness these techniques for the public and nonprofit sectors.

Charlotte Alexander

Charlotte S. Alexander holds the Connie D. and Ken McDaniel WomenLead Chair as an Associate Professor of Law and Analytics at the Robinson College of Business and the College of Law at Georgia State University. She founded and directs the university’s Legal Analytics Lab, which brings together faculty from law, business, and data science to take on legal problems and questions using computational methods. Professor Alexander’s own scholarship focuses on civil litigation, and particularly employment litigation, using text mining, natural language processing, and machine learning to uncover patterns in case filing, progress, and resolution in both courts and private dispute resolution fora. She received her B.A. from Columbia University and her J.D. from Harvard Law School.

Omar Issac Asensio

Omar I. Asensio is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research focuses on the intersection of big data and public policy, with applications to energy systems and consumer behavior, smart cities, and machine learning in transportation and electric mobility. He directs the Data Science and Policy Lab at Georgia Tech, where he collaborates with the private sector and city governments on data innovations in policy analysis and research evaluation. He is a faculty affiliate at the Institute for Data Engineering and Science (IDEaS), the Machine Learning Center, and the Strategic Energy Institute. Dr. Asensio’s research has been published in leading journals such as Nature Energy, Nature Sustainability, and PNAS. His work uses statistical and computational tools to advance our understanding of how large-scale civic data and experiments can be used to increase participation in civic processes, while addressing resource conservation and environmental sustainability. He received a B.S. and M.S. from the University of Southern California, and his doctorate in Environmental Science & Engineering from the University of California Los Angeles.

Lauren F. Klein

Lauren Klein is Winship Distinguished Research Professor and Associate Professor in the departments of English and Quantitative Theory & Methods at Emory University, where she also directs the Digital Humanities Lab. Before moving to Emory, she taught in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. Dr. Klein works at the intersection of digital humanities, data science, and early American literature, with a focus on issues of gender and race. She has designed platforms for exploring the contents of historical newspapers, modeled the invisible labor of women abolitionists, and recreated forgotten visualization schemes with fabric and addressable LEDs. In 2017, she was named one of the "rising stars in digital humanities" by Inside Higher Ed. She is the author of An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and, with Catherine D’Ignazio, Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020). Her current project, Data by Design: An Interactive History of Data Visualization, 1786-1900, was recently funded by an NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant.

Jesse D. Lecy

Jesse Lecy is college professor of Data Science and Nonprofit Studies at the Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions and an associate professor in the School of Community Resources and Development. He is currently on leave as a Data Scientist at the Urban Institute. His research examines the economics of the nonprofit sector with a focus on the life-cycles of charitable organizations, nonprofit entrepreneurship, and performance of social programs, as well as work on urban policies that promote strong communities. He has worked actively to integrate data science into public affairs and data-driven management practices in public and nonprofit organizations. He is an advocate of open science practices in scholarship and a co-founder of the Nonprofit Open Data Collective, a group of industry experts and data scientists that are committed to creating better data for the sector. He received his B.A. from the University of St. Thomas, an M.S. from Carnegie Melon, and his doctorate from Syracuse University.

Olga Churkina

Olga Churkina is a Ph.D. candidate in Public Policy jointly at Georgia State University and Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research interests include experimental and quasi-experimental methods for education and labor market policies, microeconomics models of human behavior, and applications of big data. Her background is in Quantitative Economics and she is currently involved in the Smart Cities project as a member of the Data Science and Policy Lab at Georgia Tech. Furthermore, she is working on a prosocial behavior research at GSU ExCEN as well as a labor market field experiment for her dissertation.