People
Faculty
Lai Sze Tso
Lai Sze Tso is an Assistant Professor at Gustavus Adolphus College, an External Member and 2023 Population Scholar at the University of Minnesota – Minnesota Population Center, a 2025 Teaching and Learning Fellow at the Alpha Kappa Delta International Sociology Honor Society, and an Education Board Member for the American Public Health Association. She uses quantitative and ethnographic research for health advocacy, with a focus on applying social media and health technology interventions to address large scale and community-level challenges. She teaches hands-on workshops and courses to doctors, nurses, health professionals, and community health care workers to target-train skills such as state-of-the-field literature reviews, intervention design, and client-patient technology interphase to improve outcomes. Using community-based participatory research (CBPR) methodology, she works closely with social services organizations and government health agencies to explore pathways to tailor technology usage based on the demographics of client-patient and caregiver populations. She has studied health innovations in international contexts, exploring how youth, health professionals, and sandwich generation caregivers learn, transmit, and utilize technology across in-person, hybrid, online formats in health curriculum and social network settings.
Kat Albrecht
Kat Albrecht is an Assistant Professor at Truman State University in the Social Sciences and Human Inquiry Department and long-time supporter of SICSS. Kat first worked with SICSS as a participant herself at the first ever SICSS site at Princeton University in 2017. She holds a PhD in sociology and a JD from Northwestern University. She is also a current MFA student at the University of Georgia in the screenwriting program. Kat’s research sits at the intersection of computational social science, the study of fear, and criminal law. She directs her lab - the Fear and Computational Law Lab – which uses innovative methods to measure how fear becomes entangled with U.S. law. Kat is also the Executive Director of the SCALES OKN, a court data non-profit that works to make public data meaningfully public such that everyone can measure what’s happening in the legal system at scale. She is also the North American Director of the Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science. Outside of her academic and non-profit pursuits Kat is a staff writer for Horror DNA where she specializes in reviewing creature features, low-budget horror, and practical special effect films.Speakers
Justin Hollis, Research Scientist, Minnesota Compass, Amherst H. Wilder Foundation
Justin specializes in policy research, program evaluation, data science and economic analysis using surveys, social indicators, demographic, and geographic analysis for measuring quality of life.Teaching Assistants