2024-2025 Cohort
Amit Kumar Das
Amitkumar.das@stonybrook.edu
Computer Science
Dr. Klaus Mueller
Amit is a PhD candidate in the Computer Science Department. His advisor is Dr. Klaus Mueller. Amit obtained his BS and MS in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. His research interests include Human-Computer Interaction, Visual Analytics, and AI.
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Srivardhan (Sri) Jangili
Srivardhan.jangili@stonybrook.edu
Political Science
Darya (Dasha) Likhacheva
Darya.likhacheva@stonybrook.edu
Psychology, Social & Health
Weiling Li
Weiling.li@stonybrook.edu
Psychology, Cognitive
Dr. Susan Brennan & Dr. Christian Luhmann
Weiling is a PhD student in Cognitive Science at Stony Brook University. Her research focuses on the factors influencing human decision-making processes. Specifically, she investigates how interactions with artificial intelligence impact individual and group decision-making behaviors.
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2023-2024 Cohort
Alexandra Anthonioz
Alexandra.Anthonioz@stonybrook.edu
Psychology, Social & Health
Dr. Bonita London
Alexandra Anthonioz is a PhD student in the Social and Health Psychology Department at Stony Brook University. She received her BS in Psychology and her BA in Spanish from California Lutheran University in 2022. Her research interests include bias and prejudice within social institutions as well as an emphasis on forensics/criminal psychology. She has previously done research regarding jury decision making as well as perceptions of impostorism in academia. Alex is also interested in learning more about bias within AI and ways to bring awareness to these issues through interdisciplinary work.
Tina Behzad
Tbehzad@cs.stonybrook.edu
Computer Science
Dr. Klaus Mueller
Tina is a PhD student in Computer Science. She currently works with Professor Mueller on ways to visualize, address, and mitigate bias on datasets. She is dedicated to exploring the intricacies of AI algorithms and their implications on society and hopes to bridge the gap between research on fairness in academia and its real-world applications.
AJ Castle
AJ.Castle@stonybrook.edu
Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Dr. Victoria Hesford
AJ Castle is a doctoral student in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. AJ works in technomediated intimacies, looking at complex relationships between and around technology and care. AJ is broadly interested in questions of technology and gender, digital media, video games, and the legacy of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
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Dana Golden
Dana.Golden@stonybrook.edu
Economics
Dr. Yiyi Zhou
Dana is a PhD student in Economics with a focus on industrial organization. She primarily works on electricity markets and corporate finance with some work related to environmental justice. She holds master's degrees in economics and analytics from Georgia Tech. She has worked as an economist for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and USDA Economic Research Service as well as a data scientist for the Treasury. In her free time, she enjoys reading, creative writing, and performing standup.
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Benjamin Hechtman
Benjamin.Hechtman@stonybrook.edu
Applied Mathematics & Statistics
Dr. Wei Zhu
Benjy is a PhD student in the Applied Math & Statistics Department at Stony Brook. He received his B.A. in Math and Physics from Brandeis University and his M.Ed. in Higher Education from Harvard University. His current research interests include applications of statistical modeling and machine learning to answer questions across different domains, including climate modeling and college student success.
Brett Indelicato
Brett.Indelicato@stonybrook.edu
Economics
Dr. Hugo Benitez-Silva
Brett is a PhD student in Economics. He received his BA in Economics from Stony Brook University. His research interests include macroeconomics and environmental economics, with a specific interest in carbon taxes and the economic inequalities resulting from climate change.
MacKenzie Johnson
Mackenzie.Johnson@stonybrook.edu
Psychology, Cognitive Science
Dr. Susan Brennan
MacKenzie is a PhD student in the Cognitive Science Psychology doctoral program working with Professor Susan Brennan. She received her BA in Psychology with a minor in Management from Clark University in Massachusetts. Her research interests involve studying multilingualism and other associated characteristics including dialects and accented language use.
Adil Soubki
Adil.Soubki@stonybrook.edu
Computer Science
Dr. Owen Rambow
Adil Soubki is a PhD student in the department of Computer Science. He holds a dual B.S. in mathematics and physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an M.S. in applied mathematics from Stony Brook. His research focuses on building computational systems for tasks in natural language processing which require theory of mind (i.e., reasoning about the mental states of others) and using these models as tools to study how cognitive states (e.g., beliefs, desires, intentions) interact with language. Areas of interest include in politeness theory, audience modeling, common ground, social norms, discourse and pragmatics, low-resource NLP, and applications to computational social science.
Ignacio Urbina
Ignacio.Urbina@stonybrook.edu
Political Science
Dr. Reuben Kline
Ignacio is a PhD student in Political Science, focusing on comparative political behavior
and political economy. His research primarily examines the politics of AI, exploring
issues such as the political implications of human-computer interactions, the political
economy of AI regulation, how citizens develop attitudes and beliefs about AI's role
in society, and the potential of AI to enhance citizens' political knowledge and democratic
engagement. He also investigates the origins and dynamics of citizens' democratic
attitudes and how state violence influences democratic outcomes and behaviors.
Zhengxiang (Jack) Wang
Zhengxiang.Wang@stonybrook.edu
Linguistics
Dr. Jeffrey Heinz
Jack has been a PhD student in Linguistics since Fall 2022. His research interests are in Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, Formal Language Theory, Machine Learning, and Computational Social Science. More about his research can be found at https://www.zhengxiang-wang.me/.
Evan West
Etwest@cs.stonybrook.edu
Computer Science
Dr. Michael Bender
Evan is a PhD Candidate in the Computer Science Department. His advisor is Dr. Michael Bender. Before coming to Stony Brook, Evan obtained his BS in Computer Science from UC Santa Cruz in 2019. Evan's research is at the intersection of algorithms theory and systems engineering in areas such as graph streaming/sketching, external memory data-structures, and learning augmented algorithms. He is interested in investigating the ways in which ML models reproduce and reinforce existing biases, and the impacts of efforts towards achieving fairness in ML.
2022-2023 Cohort
Rosa Bermejo
Rosa.bermejo@stonybrook.edu
Psychology, Social & Health
Dr. Bonita London
Rosa is a PhD student in the Social and Health Psychology department at Stony Brook University. She received her BA in psychology from Hunter College, CUNY. Her research interests involve discrimination experiences and the wellbeing of racial minorities. Specifically, she is interested in how different racial discrimination experiences affect the academic and psychological wellbeing of Black and Latinx students.
Karin Hasegawa
karin.hasegawa@stonybrook.edu
Applied Mathematics & Statistics
Dr. Yuefan Deng
Karin is a PhD student in Applied Mathematics and Statistics working with Professor Yuefan Deng. Her research interests lie in the field of high-dimensional statistics with applications to deep learning, and molecular dynamics simulations of viruses.
Pei-Hsun Hsieh
pei-hsun.hsieh@stonybrook.edu
Political Science
Dr. Reuben Kline
Pei-Hsun is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Stony Brook University. His research interests lie at the boundary of political economy, behavioral economics, and political behavior. His research focuses on how social preferences and beliefs affect collective decision-making, collective actions (e.g., mitigating public health crises and climate change), and redistributive policies. He uses a variety of methods, including experiments, machine learning, and agent-based modeling.
Kalina Kostyszyn
kalina.kostyszyn@stonybrook.edu
Linguistics
Dr. Jeffrey Heinz
Kalina Kostyszyn is a PhD student in the Linguistics Department at Stony Brook University, advised by Jeffrey Heinz. She graduated in 2017 from Bryn Mawr College with a B.A. in Computer Science and Linguistics, and was a visiting scholar in Linguistics at the University of Delaware for a year before coming to Stony Brook. Her research is on phonology, morphophonology, and computational modeling of these processes. She also has worked on improving computational literacy with high schoolers, to better prepare them for a world influenced by AI.
James May
james.may@stonybrook.edu
Psychology, Cognitive
Dr. Susan Brennan
James is a PhD student in Psychology. He is interested in how people use language to effectively communicate with one another. He is also interested in learning about ways to ameliorate harmful effects of bias in big data and AI.
John Murzaku
jmurzaku@cs.stonybrook.edu
Computer Science
Dr. Owen Rambow
John is a Computer Science PhD student advised by Dr. Owen Rambow. His main research interests are in modeling belief, sentiment, and the respective holder or targets of these beliefs or sentiments. He is also interested in exploring annotation bias in belief/event factuality corpora and bias in large language models fine-tuned on belief/factuality corpora.
Veronica Oelerich
veronica.oelerich@stonybrook.edu
Political Science
Dr. Reuben Kline
Veronica is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at Stony Brook University. Her research adopts a political psychological approach to studying public opinion regarding the criminal justice system, ranging from racially motivated reasoning about police brutality to public opinion on AI as it is used in predictive policing.
Sekine Ozturk
sekine.ozturk@stonybrook.edu
Psychology, Clinical
Dr. Aprajita Mohanty
Sekine is a PhD student in the Clinical Psychology Program. Her overarching research goal is to elucidate the mechanisms by which emotions impair or facilitate cognitive processing in transdiagnostic populations. She uses neuroimaging, computational modeling, machine learning and behavioral paradigms to answer her research questions. Better understanding the underlying mechanisms of cognitive and emotional processing may inform evidence-based clinical interventions. Her primary research advisor is Dr. Aprajita Mohanty.
Amie Paige
amie.paige@stonybrook.edu
Psychology, Cognitive
Dr. Susan Brennan
Amie Paige is a cognitive PhD student whose work is focused on using psycholinguistic approaches to examine complex, interactional situations. She graduated with a BA in Psychology in 2013 from Texas A&M University-Commerce before working for a Fortune 50 company as an data analyst. During her time in industry, she developed the technical acumen to analyze trends within big data, presented strategy recommendations to upper leadership, and observed the ways that biases shaped mindsets at all levels within the organization. Such observations inspired her to return to school to earn her MS in Psychology. Her research focused on examining linguistic behaviors within diverse collaborations and using machine learning techniques to study how language influences judgments of others. She left her industry role to pursue a PhD at Stony Brook University where she now studies how language is shaped by the constraints of speaker needs, listener needs, and situations. She hopes to continue to explore the roots of bias and ways of detecting it within language. Passionate about the power of data science, she aspires to use her training as a social scientist to improve educational and industrial spaces.
Medhini Urs
medhini.urs@stonybrook.edu
Psychology, Cognitive
Dr. Christian Luhmann
Medhini is a PhD student in Cognitive Science at Stony Brook University. She received her BS in Psychology from Florida Southern College. Her research interests include investigating the cognitive factors behind economic and social decision-making.
Carl Wiedemann
carl.wiedemann@stonybrook.edu
Psychology, Social & Health
Dr. Antonio Freitas
Carl Wiedemann is a PhD student in the Social and Health Psychology Doctoral Program at Stony Brook University. In 2019, he graduated from the University at Buffalo with a B.A. with Honors in Psychology, and minors in Philosophy and Counseling. Across separate investigations, Carl has studied bias in political ideologies, bias in information sampling, and bias in self-perceptions. Currently, he works in the Self-Regulation and Cognition Lab under the mentorship of Dr. Antonio Freitas. Carl’s ongoing research projects focus on the relationship between how people consider the future consequences of their actions and the subjective experience of behaving automatically. Automatic responses tend towards stereotyped judgements. Thus, a primary goal of Carl’s research is to identify psychological and contextual factors which can buffer against biased behavioral responses to situational cues. As Carl continues through his doctoral training, he is eager to gain formal education in computer science techniques through the BIAS-NRT program, which will grant him the tools necessary to continue addressing novel questions about the effects of bias on human behavior and perceptions.