SICSS-Howard/Mathematica

Terri Adams, Ph.D.

Terri Adams, Ph.D. is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Howard University, and she currently serves as the Associate Dean for Research with the Graduate School. Additionally, she serves as the Deputy Director of the NOAA Cooperative Science Center for Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology (NCAS-M) at the university. In addition to her administrative duties, Dr. Adams’ conducts research that takes a multidisciplinary approach to examine issues that have both theoretical and practical implications. Her specific research interests include emergency management, policing, violence, and the impact of trauma and disasters on individuals and organizations. Her most recent work centers on the decision-making processes of both individuals and organizations in the face of crisis events. Her most recent publication, Policing in Disasters: Stress, Resilience, and the Challenges of Emergency Management is co-authored with Dr. Leigh Anderson.

Naniette H. Coleman

Naniette H. Coleman is a Ph.D. candidate in the Sociology Department at the University of California, Berkeley and a UC-National Lab In-Residence Graduate Fellow at Los Alamos National Lab. Since 2016, Naniette has directed the AAC&U award winning Interdisciplinary Research Group on Privacy at Berkeley. Naniette is an affiliate of the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, the Center for Long-term Cybersecurity, and the Center for Technology, Society, and Policy at Berkeley as well as the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and Berkman-Klein Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard University. Naniette’s research sits at the intersection of the sociology of culture and organizations and focuses on cybersecurity, surveillance, and privacy in the US context. Specifically Naniette’s research examines how organizations assess risk, make decisions, and respond to data breaches and organizational compliance with state, federal, and international privacy laws. Naniette holds a Master of Public Administration with a specialization in Democracy, Politics, and Institutions from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and both an M.A. in Economics and a B.A. in Communication from the University at Buffalo, SUNY. A non-traditional student, Naniette’s prior professional experience includes local, state, and federal service, as well as work for two international organizations, and two universities.

Rebecca (Linchi) Hsu, Ph.D.

Dr. Rebecca Hsu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at Howard University, Washington, D.C. She has a Ph.D. in Economics from University of Washington, Seattle. Her research concentrates on household economics, intimate partner violence, and the economics of crime. She is currently working on projects on the CARES Act and domestic violence. She has published her research in journals such as Economic Inquiry, Review of Economics of the Household, Feminist Economics, Journal of Family and Economic Issues, and Journal of Economic Studies among others.

Nicole Jenkins, Ph.D.

Nicole is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Howard University. She received her Doctoral degree from the University of Nevada Las Vegas in the Department of Sociology in 2020. She obtained an M.A. in Sociology in 2017 and B.A. in Sociology in 2015 from the University of Nevada Las Vegas. In 2013, she received an A.A. in Criminal Justice after serving six years of active duty in the United States Air Force as Military Police. She is a proud advocate for social justice and is committed to teaching with such emphasis in topics such as race and ethnic studies, sociology of poverty, problems of the black community, and research methods.

Anthony K. Wutoh, Ph.D., R.Ph.

Anthony K. Wutoh, Ph.D., R.Ph. is the Provost of Howard University. He previously served in various roles at the University including as Dean of the College of Pharmacy and Assistant Provost for International Programs. Dr. Wutoh has also served as Director for the Center for Minority Health Services Research, and the Center of Excellence. Dr. Wutoh received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Biochemistry from the University of Maryland Baltimore County in 1987. He then completed a Bachelor of Science in Pharmacy, and Doctor of Philosophy in Pharmacy Administration (Pharmacoepidemiology) at the University of Maryland, Baltimore School of Pharmacy. Dr. Wutoh has varied research interests including pharmacoepidemiology, international health, health services/outcomes research, and evaluation of large population databases, particularly in the area of AIDS and HIV infection in older patients. Dr. Wutoh has received over $50 million dollars in grant funding from several sources including; NIH, CDC, USAID, HRSA, AHRQ and foundations, and has published numerous research articles on HIV disease, medication adherence, disease state management, and various other topics in respected research journals, including; the Journal of the American Medical Association, Health Services Research, AIDS & Behavior, the Journal of the National Medical Association, and the Journal of the American Pharmacists Association.

Henry C. McKoy, Jr., Ph.D.

Dr. Henry C. McKoy, Jr. is the inaugural Director of the Office of State and Community Energy Programs (SCEP) in the United States Department of Energy. The newly created SCEP, within the Office of the Under Secretary for Infrastructure, manages $16 billion dollars in federal funding and supports the transition to an equitable clean energy economy by working with community-level implementation partners and State Energy Offices. SCEP manages the Weatherization Assistance Program, State Energy Program, Community Energy Programs, and Energy Future Grants. He is a seasoned professional in business, community and economic development, policy, government, finance, energy, philanthropy and the academic worlds. Prior to the Presidential appointment to the US DOE, Dr. McKoy served on the faculty at North Carolina Central University School of Business where he led the entrepreneurship program, with additional academic appointments at Duke, the UNC-Chapel Hill, and Harvard. He is a former senior banking executive, successful entrepreneur, and former Assistant Secretary of the NC Department of Commerce. Henry has been a Fellow of the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise at UNC-Chapel Hill, an affiliated faculty of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity, as well as an Aspen Institute Scholar. McKoy has won many awards and honors. He has been a sought-after consultant by both government and private industry regarding inclusive entrepreneurship and economic development policy. He has also been an active economic development professional, focused on economic inclusivity in mixed-use real estate projects. He is a regular contributor to media – television, radio, and print. Dr. McKoy engages in over 120 media interviews annually with local, state, regional, national, and international media. He speaks on dozens of academic and public panels a year speaking on his research across the US, and publishes in peer-reviewed journals, as well as mass media publications. His most recent writing appears in the new book The Pandemic Divide: How Covid Increased Inequality in America (Duke University Press), where his chapter, Race, Entrepreneurship, and COVID-19: Black Small Business Survival in Prepandemic and Postpandemic America analyzes and speaks on the impact that COVID has had on the Black economic landscape. He holds degrees from UNC-Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School (B.S.), Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment (M.S.), and UNC-Chapel Hill’s Department of City and Regional Planning with concentrations in Economic Development, Entrepreneurship, and Impact Economics and Investing (Ph.D.).

Latanya Sweeney, Ph.D.

Professor of the Practice of Government and Technology at the Harvard Kennedy School and in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Editor-in-Chief of Technology Science, and the founding Director of the Public Interest Tech Lab, Data Privacy Lab, and the Tech Science Program at Harvard. Sweeney creates and uses technology to assess and solve societal, political and governance problems, and teaches others how to do the same. She pioneered the field known as data privacy and her work is cited in the HIPAA Privacy Rule and other federal privacy regulations worldwide. Her work on discrimination in online ads ignited the new research area known as algorithmic fairness. She is an elected fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics, with more than 100 academic publications, 3 patents, 7000 academic citations, and 3 company spin-offs. She has received numerous professional, academic and lifetime achievement awards and testified before federal and international government bodies. Among other federal appointments, Sweeney formerly served as the Chief Technology Officer at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. In 2018, Harvard launched its new Program in Technology Science, which prepares students for jobs as technologists that work in the public interest. The program is based on Sweeney's prior success at teaching students to scientifically assess unforeseen consequences in technology and to work in civil society organizations, government, and technology companies. Sweeney joined with 50 scholars worldwide to launch the Technology Science Initiative to promote the approach broadly. Sweeney earned her Ph.D. in computer science from MIT in 2001, being the first black woman to do so. Before joining Harvard as a faculty member, Sweeney was the Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, where she taught computer science, technology and policy from 1998 to 2011. She and her spouse currently serve as the X.D. and Nancy Yang Faculty Deans of Currier House at Harvard College. Professor Sweeney also serves as a member of the inaugural global Technology Policy Council of the Association for Computing Machinery, the world's largest association of computer scientists and professionals.

Jeff Bernson, M.P.A, M.P.H.

Mathematica, a full-service research and analytics firm committed to helping address the world’s most pressing development challenges, announced that Jeff Bernson has been named senior vice president and general manager of the International Unit. Bernson takes on this role as Mathematica’s expanding global footprint provides its partners with an unparalleled combination of regional and local expertise and the backing of a deep bench of experts committed to helping them make a difference. ‘As an organization committed to driving global impact, our International Unit is critical to our mission to improve well-being around the world,’ said president and chief executive officer Paul Decker. ‘Jeff’s focus on partnerships, analytics, and innovation, combined with his passion for advancing global health equity, will help us grow our work and its impact with new clients and in new areas.’ Bernson brings critical experience and demonstrated success in technology development, commercialization, and market innovation, having most recently been chief programs and innovation officer at PATH. During his time at PATH, he also served in a variety of roles including vice president of technology, analytics, and market innovation, and as a senior director working in its Nairobi, Kenya office. ‘Mathematica’s comprehensive intersectoral approach, coupled with its ability to help translate evidence into impactful policies and actions, makes a meaningful difference in the lives of people around the world,’ said Jeff Bernson. ‘I am looking forward to helping the team drive positive change.’

Deen Freelon, Ph.D.

Deen Freelon is an Associate Professor at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina and a principal researcher at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP). His theoretical interests address how ordinary citizens use social media and other digital communication technologies for political purposes, paying particular attention to how identity characteristics (e.g. race, gender, ideology) influence these uses. Methodologically, he is interested in how computational research techniques can be used to answer some of the most fundamental questions of communication science. Freelon has worked at the forefront of political communication and computational social science for over a decade, coauthoring some of the first communication studies to apply computational methods to social media data. Computer programming lies at the heart of his research practice, which generates novel tools (and sometimes methods) to answer questions existing approaches cannot address. He developed his first research tool, ReCal, as part of his master’s thesis, and it has since been used by tens of thousands of researchers worldwide. His scholarship has been financially supported by grantmakers including the U.S. Institute of Peace, the Spencer Foundation, the Knight Foundation, and the Hewlett Foundation; and published in top-tier journals including Nature, Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Freelon earned his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 2012 and formerly taught at American University in Washington, D.C.

Desmond U. Patton, Ph.D.

Desmond Upton Patton studies the impact social media has on well-being, mental health, trauma, violence and grief for youth and adults of color. He leverages social work thinking, data science, qualitative methods, and community partnerships to develop strategies to support digital grief and trauma and reduce on and offline gun-related violence. Desmond Upton Patton is the Brian and Randi Schwartz University Professor and the thirty-first Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor. He has joint appointments in the School of Social Policy & Practice and the Annenberg School for Communication along with a secondary appointment in the department of psychiatry in the Perelman School of Medicine.

Imani N. S. Munyaka, Ph.D.

Dr. Munyaka earned her B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Dayton and an M.S. in Computer Science from Kentucky State University. She earned a Ph.D. in Human-Centered Computing from the University of Florida where she conducted research as a member of the Human-Experience Research lab and Florida Institute for Cybersecurity. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of California, San Diego in the Computer Science and Engineering department. Her research intertwines security, privacy, and computer interaction with a general goal of equity in experiences and outcomes for marginalized identities.

Iya Funlayo E. Wood, Ph.D.

Iya Funlayo earned her PhD in African and African American Studies and Religion at Harvard University and her research centers philosophical and theological aspects of Ifá-Òrìsà tradition as practiced in Nigeria and in the Americas, and cross-cultural analysis of Yoruba religious concepts and practice – within all of which she privileges Yoruba language as a conduit to understanding. Her work has been published in various scholarly and public venues and she has appeared in documentaries for PBS and the National Geographic Channel. Spirit permeates both her scholarship and her service, and she founded Ase Ire in 2010 as a place to share her spiritual gifts and the things she has learned from her teachers with the world, especially with those new to African Spirituality.

Ifeoma Ajunwa, J.D., Ph.D.

Professor Ifeoma Ajunwa, J.D., Ph.D., is an award-winning tenured law professor and author of the highly acclaimed book, The Quantified Worker, published by Cambridge University Press. At Emory, she is the AI.Humanity Professor of Law and Ethics and Founding Director of the AI and the Law Program. She is also the Associate Dean for Projects and Partnerships at Emory Law (starting January 2024). Professor Ajunwa was recruited from the University of North Carolina School of Law where she was a tenured law professor and the Founding Director of the Artificial Intelligence Decision-Making Research (AI-DR) Program at UNC Law. Professor Ajunwa is currently a Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project (ISP). She has been a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University since 2017. She was a 2019 recipient of the NSF CAREER Award and a 2018 recipient of the Derrick A. Bell Award from the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). Dr. Ajunwa’s research interests are at the intersection of law and technology with a particular focus on the ethical governance, privacy, and discrimination issues associated with workplace AI and automated decision-making technologies. She also has an interest in the generative power of art for law with a focus on law and literature and law and film.

Lindsey D. Cameron, Ph.D.

Lindsey D. Cameron is an Assistant Professor of management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on how algorithmic management is changing the modern workplace, especially individual’s behaviors at work. Professor Cameron has an on-going, five-year ethnography of the largest employer in the gig economy, the ride-hailing industry, exploring how algorithms are fundamentally reshaping the nature of managerial control. She is currently studying how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting gig workers on different platforms (e.g., TaskRabbit, Instacart, AmazonFlex) as well as examining how ride-hailing drivers on three continents navigate disputes. Professor Cameron’s work has been published in leading academic journals, including Organization Science, Journal of Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Process, Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, and proceedings of the Association of Computing Machinery and the Academy of Management. She has also published opinion pieces in Fast Company, Kiplinger’s, and the Society of Human Resource Management’s flagship magazine People & Strategy and her research has been mentioned in numerous media outlets including Bloomberg, NPR’s Marketplace, Fast Company, the World Economic Forum, CNBC, Forbes, The Skim, and Inc.

Charlotte Garden, J.D.

Charlotte Garden is a Law professor at the University of Minnesota, and specializes in labor law, employment law, and constitutional law. Her interests include the intersection of workers' rights and the Constitution, and how law supports (or undermines) worker voice and power. Prior to coming to the University of Minnesota, Professor Garden was a professor at Seattle University School of Law where she served as Co-Associate Dean for Research & Faculty Development. In 2016 she was a visiting professor at the University of Alabama School of Law. Professor Garden clerked for Judge Thomas L. Ambro of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. She received her J.D. from NYU School of Law (2003) and her B.A. from McGill University (2000).

Gabrielle Rejouis, J.D.

Gabrielle Rejouis is an advocate for ending surveillance at work at United for Respect and the Athena Coalition. Before joining United for Respect, she managed the federal technology and antitrust lobbying portfolio at Color Of Change. She also worked at the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law where she co-organized the Color of Surveillance: Monitoring Poor and Working People conference. Gabrielle received her J.D. from Georgetown Law with a Certificate in Refugee and Humanitarian Emergencies. She earned her B.A. in History from the New Jersey Institute of Technology where she was an Albert Dorman Honors scholar.

Keith E. Sonderling, J.D.

Keith E. Sonderling was confirmed by the U.S. Senate, with a bipartisan vote, to be a Commissioner on the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in 2020. Until January of 2021, he served as the Commission’s Vice-Chair. His term expires July of 2024. Prior to his confirmation to the EEOC, Commissioner Sonderling served as the Acting and Deputy Administrator of the Wage and Hour Division at the U.S. Department of Labor. Before joining the Department of Labor in 2017, Commissioner Sonderling practiced Labor and Employment law in Florida. Commissioner Sonderling also serves as a Professional Lecturer in the Law at The George Washington University Law School, teaching employment discrimination. Since joining the EEOC, one of Commissioner Sonderling’s highest priorities is ensuring that artificial intelligence and workplace technologies are designed and deployed consistent with long-standing civil rights laws. Commissioner Sonderling has published numerous articles on the benefits and potential harms of using artificial intelligence-based technology in the workplace and speaks globally on these emerging issues.

Howard University

Howard University has long held a commitment to the study of disadvantaged persons in American society and throughout the world. The goal is the elimination of inequities related to race, color, social, economic and political circumstances. As the only truly comprehensive predominantly Black university, Howard is one of the major engineers of change in our society. Through its traditional and cutting-edge academic programs, the University seeks to improve the circumstances of all people in the search for peace and justice on earth.

Mathematica

Mathematica is the insight partner that illuminates the path to progress for public- and private-sector changemakers. We apply expertise at the intersection of data, methods, policy, and practice, translating big questions into deep insights that weather the toughest tests. Driven by our mission to improve public well-being, we collaborate closely with our clients to improve programs, refine strategies, and enhance understanding.

SICSS-Howard/Mathematica

The Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science (SICSS) were created to provide free training to the next generation of researchers at the intersection of social science and data science— and to incubate cutting-edge research across disciplinary boundaries. Participants at each institute a) hear lectures by leading scholars in the field on a range of subjects from automated text analysis to experiments on social media platforms; b) participate in group training exercises; and c) launch interdisciplinary research projects. SICSS thus aims to provide open, high-quality training in computational social science to researchers around the world in order to accelerate the growth of the field and ensure that it develops practices that are in the long-term interests of science and society. Lectures are live-streamed to all SICSS sites from a central location and supported via a vibrant online community that includes open-source education materials that can be used for further self-study or as a model for computational social science courses within other organizations.

D-Lab

D-Lab 1) helps Berkeley graduate students, faculty, and staff move forward with world-class research in data intensive social science and humanities; 2) assists the Berkeley community with the full range of research development, research design and data acquisition. We offer guidance in statistical methods and results to data visualization and communication; 3) creates a learning community that teaches workshops and offers consultations.

Deloitte Center for Health Solutions & the Deloitte Health Equity Institute

The mission of the Deloitte Health Equity Institute is advancing health equity to make an impact that matters. To do it, we’re creating cross-sector collaborations and tools aimed at addressing disparities in the drivers of health, racism and bias, and structural flaws in the health system. Our goal is to create exponential change that will lead to a world in which health isn't determined by race, gender, ability status, or zip code. One in which all people have the fair and just opportunity to achieve their full potential in every aspect of their health and well-being.

Federal Reserve Board of Governors

The Federal Reserve System is the central bank of the United States. It performs five general functions to promote the effective operation of the U.S. economy and, more generally, the public interest.

Los Alamos National Laboratory

The Los Alamos National Laboratory‘s mission is to solve national security challenges through simultaneous excellence. LANL achieves maximum impact on strategic national security priorities by integrating research and development solutions with operational excellence and community engagement.

Polarization Lab

The Polarization Lab at Duke brings together scholars from the social sciences, statistics, and computer science to study how to bridge America’s partisan divide. Our mission is two-fold. First, we aim to produce the highest quality research about how social media shapes political polarization, drawing upon the latest advances in social psychology, political science, and machine learning. Second, we aim to translate the insights from our research into tools that people can use to hack political polarization from the bottom up. We work closely with other groups working to counter political polarization in the non-profit sector, private sector, and governments. Some of our work has shaped products created by social media companies.

The Data Nutrition Project

Our belief is that deeper transparency into dataset health can lead to better data decisions, which in turn lead to better AI. Founded in 2018 through the Assembly Fellowship, The Data Nutrition Project takes inspiration from nutritional labels on food, aiming to build labels that highlight the key ingredients in a dataset such as meta-data and populations, as well as unique or anomalous features regarding distributions, missing data, and comparisons to other ‘ground truth’ datasets.

vary CSS

Computational Social Science is an exciting new field of research, and we think it should be diverse and inclusive as it grows. To this end, we provide links to resources, which are intended to support new and emerging CSS scholars currently underrepresented in the field. We also maintain a database of these scholars, which can be used for collaboration and networking, or for finding new voices to speak at conferences, on panels, and in workshop tutorials. These resources are compiled and updated by the CSS community.

Neena Albarus

Neena Albarus is a Ph.D. student in Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley. She has an MSW from The University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. Her research expertise spans quantitative, qualitative, and participatory methods, with a focus on polydrug use, mental health, and citizen security in Jamaica.

Mango Jane Angar

Mango Jane Angar is a Political Science Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on Political Violence and Disability Politics. In particular, she examines how state institutions, society, and disabled persons organizations conceptualize and define disability.

James Asare

James Asare is a Ph.D. student in Mathematics and Science Education at Washington State University. His background in pure, applied, and computational mathematics fuels his research interests in CSS, gerrymandering of school districts, post-secondary math education barriers of under-served communities, and the cultural impacts of international graduate TA experiences.

Ayana Best

Ayana Best is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Howard University. She earned her Ph.D. in Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California. Her forthcoming book focuses on the effects of state-sanctioned violence on Black women’s political participation and civic engagement.

Rohitha Edara

Rohitha Edara is a Ph.D. candidate in Education Policy at Pennsylvania State University. She is interested in studying issues at the intersection of education policy, inequalities/segregation, and international development.

Dereje Ferede

Dereje Ferede played a role as Lecturer, Project Coordinator, and IT Specialist. His background is Information Systems. Currently, he is a Ph.D. student in Information Systems at Addis Ababa University. He has one publication and one work-in-progress paper. His research interests are AI, IS Security, Digital Strategy, Computational Sciences, and FinTech.

Joyonna Gamble-George

Joyonna Gamble-George is a postdoctoral fellow in the Behavioral Sciences Training Program at New York University. Her research interests are computational methods that can monitor, predict, and prevent biopsychosocial factors, including social connectedness or exclusion, that contribute to substance misuse, mental health problems, and health risk behaviors in adolescents and adults.

Beth Head

Beth Head is currently a Sociology Ph.D. student at the University of Florida, where she studies measurement as a form of social and epistemic power.

Kevin Igwe

Kevin Igwe is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He is involved in data strategy implementations at CLEVVA PTY LTD. With a Master's degree in Computer Science and a Ph.D. in Psychology, his research focuses on leveraging AI to promote prosocial behavior and mental health.

Rebekah Jones

Rebekah Jones is a Political Science Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley. Rebekah’s work examines the political economy of crime policy. Specifically, how configurations of American political institutions shape how vulnerable populations experience our democracy. Before Berkeley, Rebekah received a B.S. from Cornell University in Development Sociology, with distinction in research.

Joel Martinez

Joel E. Martinez is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s Data Science Initiative and Department of Psychology. Their research investigates how data-driven methods help us measure collective and idiosyncratic understandings of contemporary topics within race/ism, sexuality, and migration discourses.

Jia Pang

Jia Pang is a Ph.D. student at Claremont Graduate University, pursuing research in the field of education. Her research interests encompass a broad range of topics, including social media's impact on students' learning, the analysis of large-scale assessment data in education, and the growing phenomenon of shadow education.

Jackeline Romio

Jackeline Aparecida Ferreira Romio is Programme Specialist in UNFPA LACRO. She holds a post-doctoral degree in social psychology (USP), and a doctorate and a master's degree in demography (UNICAMP).

Mateo Servent

Mateo Servent is a political scientist and a master's student at CIDE. He is interested in CSS methods for experimental research and the study of scientific knowledge production from a comparative perspective. He is the founder of a student journal and an Erasmus+ Scholar at Otto Suhr Institute.

Rasheed Shabazz

Rasheed Shabazz is a journalist, urban planner, and historian. He is currently the inaugural Black Muslim Experiences Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. Shabazz' research is on the Black Press, Black masjids, neighborhood change, and the intersections of race, religion, and housing outcomes.

Kevin Smith

Kevin Smith is an Assistant Professor at Beloit College. He teaches a wide range of courses in the Economics and Business Department, including Principles of Economics, Quantitative Methods, Econometrics, Corporate Finance, and Health Economics. His research focuses on Health Economics, with a secondary focus on Financial Economics, and Economic History.

Brittany Torrez

Brittany Torrez is a postdoctoral fellow at University of Southern California Marshall School of Business. She employs multiple methodologies to further the study of diversity, equity, and inclusion in organizations. Her current research examines the psychological processes and organizational practices that reproduce racial inequality in the workplace.

Jia Wu

Jia Rung Wu, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Rehabilitation Counseling Program in the Department of Counselor Education of Northeastern Illinois University. Her programmatic research includes: Minority Students Success and Mental Health, Health Promotion, and Positive Psychology, Evidence-Based Rehabilitation Practice, and Test Construction and Research Methodology.

Naniette H. Coleman

Naniette H. Coleman is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley and a multi-year UC-National Laboratory Graduate Fellow (Los Alamos). She is the only social scientist selected for this distinction in the history of the program. Since 2016, Naniette has directed the AAC&U award winning Interdisciplinary Research Group on Privacy (Coleman Research Lab) at Berkeley. Naniette is an affiliate of the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, the Center for Long-term Cybersecurity, and the Center for Technology, Society, and Policy at Berkeley as well as the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and Berkman-Klein Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard University. Naniette’s work sits at the intersection of the sociology of culture and organizations and focuses on cybersecurity, surveillance, and privacy in the US context. Specifically, Naniette’s research examines how organizations assess risk, make decisions, and respond to data breaches and organizational compliance with state, federal, and international privacy laws. Naniette holds a Master of Public Administration with a specialization in Democracy, Politics, and Institutions from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and both an M.A. in Economics and a B.A. in Communication from the University at Buffalo, SUNY. A non-traditional student, Naniette’s prior professional experience includes local, state, and federal service, as well as work for two international organizations, and two universities.

Akira Bell

Akira Bell is Mathematica’s Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer. She oversees technology infrastructure and governance and leads strategy for delivering innovation in support of client and internal business function needs. Before joining Mathematica in 2018, Bell led the IT function for Aramark’s higher education business unit. Previously, she served as a divisional Chief Information Officer within the Hess Corporation and held various program management, application development, and technology consulting roles with UnitedHealth, IBM Global Services, and PricewaterhouseCoopers. While at Hess, she guided IT strategy during the acquisition of its retail division by Marathon Speedway and was part of the team recognized by CIO magazine with a CIO100 Award for delivering innovative IT solutions during Hurricane Sandy recovery. Bell earned a B.S.E. in Operations Research from Princeton University, where she serves as an alumni mentor for women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.

Calvin Hadley, Ph.D.

Calvin J. Hadley serves as the Senior Advisor for Strategic Initiatives in the Office of the President at Howard University. Hadley works to broker strategic partnerships that advance the University's mission: Truth and Service. Since joining Howard in 2014, he's negotiated numerous partnerships along several student programs. The most notable of these include: Howard's partnership with Google and Amazon Studios to create the Howard West Campus in Silicon Valley and the Howard Entertainment Campus in Hollywood, a partnership with the District of Columbia Public Schools which led to the creation of a dual-enrollment program that allows high school juniors and seniors to earn college credit at Howard University, and a lecture series with Congressman Elijah Cummings, former Director of the FBI James Comey, former Mayor of Washington, D.C. Vincent Gray, and others.