We are pleased to present our CTSP Fellows, Collaborators, and Affiliates for the 2017 year:
People 2017
Fellows, Affiliates & Mentors @ CTSPFellows
Shazeda Ahmed
Shazeda Ahmed is a second-year Ph.D. student at the UC Berkeley School of Information. She has worked as a researcher for the Council on Foreign Relations, Asia Society, the U.S. Naval War College, China Digital Times, and the Ranking Digital Rights corporate transparency review by New America. She recently held a research fellowship at the Citizen Lab, where she wrote about how state surveillance in China can be conducted through nationwide use of mobile payment apps and integrated third party services.
Morgan G. Ames
Project: Cultivating Ethical Silicon Valley Cultures through Diversity of Narratives
Morgan G. Ames is a postdoc at the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society at U.C. Berkeley. Morgan’s research investigates the role and limitations of utopianism in technology design. She is writing a book on One Laptop per Child, under contract with MIT Press. Her next project explores the role that utopianism plays in discourses around childhood, education, and ‘development’ in two geographically overlapping but culturally divided worlds: developer culture of Silicon Valley and the working-class and immigrant communities in the San Francisco Bay Area. Morgan got her PhD in communication and anthropology at Stanford, and was a postdoc for two years with Paul Dourish at U.C. Irvine.
Jesus M. Barajas
Project: Assessing Race and Income Disparities in Crowdsourced Safety Data Collection
Jesus M. Barajas is a postdoctoral scholar at the Safe Transportation Research and Education Center and a lecturer in the Department of City and Regional Planning. He studies transportation equity, including the travel behavior of marginalized population groups and the impacts of planning and urban form on safety and access. He earned his PhD in City and Regional Planning from UC Berkeley in 2016.
Kate Beck
Project: Assessing Race and Income Disparities in Crowdsourced Safety Data Collection
Kate Beck is a graduate student completing her Masters in City Planning and Public Health at UC Berkeley. Her main research interests are in transportation safety and security issues for under-represented groups, and on ways in which smart city initiatives can be used to involve low-income communities and communities of color in addressing and developing solutions to perceived and actual transportation safety issues.
Allyn Benintendi
Project: The Bioethics of Elective Oocyte Cryopreservation
Allyn Benintendi is an undergraduate Anthropology student with interests in science and technology studies and medicine. Her research documents the pre-regulatory age of elective oocyte cryopreservation, with a focus on the rise of the industry being made for egg freezing. She uses ethnographic methods to explore the bioethical implications at the margins of the commodification and movement of oocytes throughout this global industry. She is a Haas Scholars Fellow and Institute for International Studies Undergraduate Merit Scholar. Allyn is also currently conducting research with a medical anthropologist at UCSF Institute for Health and Aging.
Chloe Brown
Project: Preparing for Blockchain: Policy Implications and Challenges for the Financial Industry
Chloe Brown is a Master of Public Affairs student at the Goldman School of Public Policy. She is also a Senior Analyst who leads projects in the Financial Markets and Community Investment team at U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). Chloe’s professional background includes policy analysis in areas including fintech, financial crime, financial regulation, homeland security, and international affairs. Prior to focusing on policy analysis, she co-founded a web development company. Chloe graduated magma cum laude from the University of Southern California with a BA in International Relations.
Naniette H. Coleman
Project: I Regret To Inform You That Your Private Information Has Been Compromised
Naniette H. Coleman is a PhD student in the Sociology Department at the University of California Berkeley and a 2016-2017 Graduate Division, Mentored Research Fellow. Her professional career has spanned state and federal government, as well as two international organizations, and a university. Her general research interests include sociology of organizations, sociology of culture, political sociology, and sociology of work. She is currently researching privacy and also whistleblowers/leakers. Naniette holds a Master of Public Administration with a specialization in Democracy, Politics, and Institutions from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and both an M.A. in Economics and a B.A. in Communication from the University at Buffalo, SUNY.
Daniel Griffin
Project: Mapping Sites of Politics: Values at Stake in Mitigating Toxic News
Daniel Griffin is a doctoral student at the School of Information at UC Berkeley. His research interests center on information and power, looking at freedom and control in information systems and applications of scenario thinking. He is a contributor to the UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity’s “Cybersecurity Futures 2020”. Prior to entering the doctoral program, he completed the Master of Information Management and Systems program, also at the School of Information. Before graduate school he served as an intelligence analyst in the US Army, with deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. As an undergraduate, he studied philosophy at Whitworth University.
Uri Hacohen
Uri Hacohen is a doctoral law student at Berkeley Law. He has a master degree in law (LL.M.) from Columbia University and an LL.B. from Tel-Aviv University. Uri’s work focuses on intellectual property policy and access to innovation. In his dissertation, he is investigating the principles of unjust enrichment theory to remedy patent and copyright misuse in hope to strengthen user rights and defend the public domain. As a CTSP fellow he is working with Amit Elazari Bar On of an empirical project meant to investigate social media user awareness to the rights they retain in their shared creations.
Anne Jonas
Project: Cultivating Ethical Silicon Valley Cultures through Diversity of Narratives
Anne Jonas is a second year PhD student at the UC Berkeley School of Information. Her research interests include education, social justice, and social movements, particularly how education functions in our society, how students’ experiences with educational environments do (and don’t) meet their needs, strategies for dismantling and resisting unjust systems, cultivating participatory and collaborative approaches to projects, and the role of digital technologies and the internet in all of these areas. Previously, Anne worked as the Program Manager at the Barnard Center for Research on Women, and as a project director at the Participatory Culture Foundation.
Ritt Keerati
Project: Preparing for Blockchain: Policy Implications and Challenges for the Financial Industry
Ritt Keerati is a second-year Master of Public Policy student at the Goldman School of Public Policy. He has an extensive knowledge of the financial and technology industries, having worked for thirteen years as an investment banker, private equity investor, and hedge fund manager. Most recently, he worked as a hedge fund analyst responsible for evaluating investments in the technology sector. Ritt graduated from Stanford University with BS in Computer Science and BA in Economics, both with distinction.
Johann Koehler
Project: Actuarial Justice in the Twenty First Century
Johann Koehler is a student in the combined JD and PhD program in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at Berkeley Law. He holds an MPhil in Criminology from the University of Cambridge, and he was recently recognized by the European Society of Criminology for work by a scholar completed before age 35. His research focuses on the origins, applications, and limitations of scientific and technical expertise in criminal justice policy reform. Recent examples of his work appear in outlets such as Criminology, the British Medical Journal, and the Journal of Experimental Criminology.
Sam Maurer
Project: Tools and methods for inferring demographic bias in social media datasets
Sam Maurer is a Ph.D. candidate in City & Regional Planning at U.C. Berkeley. His research focuses on how people engage with urban built environments: how we conceptualize and navigate cities, how we choose where to spend time, and how these preferences and behaviors drive urban change. As a member of the Urban Analytics Lab, Sam also works on simulation tools for urban forecasting, and is an active contributor to the open-source Urban Data Science Toolkit.
Aditya Medury
Project: Assessing Race and Income Disparities in Crowdsourced Safety Data Collection
Aditya Medury is a postdoctoral scholar at the Safe Transportation Research and Education Center (SafeTREC), University of California, Berkeley. He received an M.S. and Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from UC Berkeley in 2009 and 2013 respectively. His research interests include pedestrian safety, surrogate safety analysis, and transportation asset management.
Amit Elazari Bar On
Amit Elazari Bar On is a doctoral law student at Berkeley Law. She graduated from her master degree in law (LL.M.) in IDC Israel, following the submission of a thesis in the field of intellectual property (IP) and contracts. She holds an LL.B and a B.A in Business from IDC and is admitted to practice law in Israel. Amit has been engaged in extensive academic work, including research, teaching and editorial positions. Her research interests include patents, private ordering in IP, privacy, copyright, and cyber law. Her work has been published in the Canadian Intellectual Property Journal and she serves as a member of Berkeley Law & Technology Journal, the world’s leading IP journal.
Gil Rothschild
Project: Actuarial Justice in the Twenty First Century
Gil Rothschild is a PhD student in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy program at Berkeley. Gil’s research focuses on the sociology of punishment and knowledge, and it is largely informed by social and critical theory. Among other things, he is interested in non-custodial penal practices and their reliance on data science in its various forms. Gil holds an LL.M from New York University and an LL.B. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He clerked for the Supreme Court of Israel and he is a member of the Israeli bar since 2012.
Peter Rowland
Peter Rowland is a Master’s candidate at the UC Berkeley School of Information, where he focuses on data science and technology policy. Since 2009, he has worked at Packet Clearing House, a non-profit technology organization that supports operators of global Internet infrastructure. In this role, he works with a wide range of stakeholders from the network operations, Internet governance, and policy-making communities.
Steve Trush
Steve Trush is a Master’s candidate at the UC Berkeley School of Information, specializing in information policy and international development. As a member of the United States military and other federal government agencies, he has spent over a decade supporting international security initiatives with work ranging from data analysis and policy advising to technology development and training. Steve’s current work explores the broad impact of technologies on the tensions between national security and human rights or civil liberties, including studying police-citizen interactions, the information architectures used by Syrian casualty monitors, and the computational classification of bulk email collections.
Emily Witt
Emily Witt is a Master’s candidate at the School of Information. Before graduate school she developed information and communication tools at Room to Read. While in school, she has studied the influence of UCPD’s crime alerts on student perceptions of risk, safety, community, and expression on campus, and has worked on a range of projects from visualization of prejudice in online dating to a tool exploring user expectations around moderation of harassing comments on internet platforms. She is passionate about partnering with people and communities to create tools that support the advancement of human rights, social justice, and civil liberties.
Collaborators
Jenna Burrell
Project: Cultivating Ethical Silicon Valley Cultures through Diversity of Narratives
Jenna Burrell is an Associate Professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley. Her first book Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafes of Urban Ghana (The MIT Press) came out in May 2012. She has a PhD in Sociology from the London School of Economics. Before pursuing her PhD she was an Application Concept Developer in the People and Practices Research Group at Intel Corporation. For over 10 years she studied the appropriation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) by individuals and groups on the African continent. Her most recent research considers populations that are excluded from or opt-out of Internet connectivity in urban and rural California.
Affiliates
Amanda Lee
Project: I Regret To Inform You That Your Private Information Has Been Compromised
Amanda is a senior at Wellesley College majoring in Africana Studies and minoring in Health & Society.
Tiffany Lo
Project: I Regret To Inform You That Your Private Information Has Been Compromised
Tiffany is a sophomore at the University of California, Berkeley majoring in Political Science and Rhetoric.
Talia Schwartz-Maor
Talia is a doctoral student at UC Berkeley Boalt Hall School of Law (JSD), where she studies the intersection of law, society and technology and specifically, the legal functioning of technology and its impact on traditional legal norms and institutions. She previously received her LL.B from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2012) and an LL.M from Berkeley Law (2015). Her dissertation focuses on storytelling on social media as a self-help mechanism and an alternative for the traditional criminal justice discourse. Talia has a vast academic experience with social networks and empirics. Some of her past work include a legal analysis of privacy versus the right to information in electronic access to court records and a theoretical analysis of Wikipedia’s debate mechanism as a self-regulating community. Additionally, while attending workshops at Berkeley D-Lab, Talia conducted an interdisciplinary research that incorporates Topic Modeling and semantic meaning to form a legal citation recommendation engine (co-authored). As a member of Berkeley Law & Technology Journal (BTLJ), Talia contributed to The Annual Review 2015 writing on the criminalization of cyberbullying. In the past two years, Talia has been serving as a graduate teacher assistant both at the law school for Legal Research and Writing for LL.M course, as well as in the sociology department / Information School’ Social Media and Virtual Communities course. Talia is also a member of BIPLA (Berkeley Information Privacy Law Association). Talia is admitted to practice law in Israel and prior to Berkeley she interned for Israel State Attorney, and worked at Google Israel legal team.
Andrew Yang
Project: I Regret To Inform You That Your Private Information Has Been Compromised
Andrew Yang is a junior at the University of California, Berkeley majoring in Applied Math and History.
Banner Photo Credit: “UC Berkeley South Hall” by Anand Rajagopal for I School IMSA is licensed under CC BY 2.0