Bios

Cathy O’Neil

Cathy O’Neil earned a PhD in mathematics from Harvard and worked as a mathematics professor at Barnard College before switching over to the private sector, working as a quant for the hedge fund D.E. Shaw and a data scientist in the New York start-up scene. She is a regular contributor to Bloomberg Opinion and author of Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (Crown, 2016). She is the CEO of O’Neil Risk Consulting & Algorithmic Auditing and a member of the Public Interest Tech Lab at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her latest book is The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation (Crown, 2022).

Hany Farid

Hany Farid is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, with a joint appointment in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and the School of Information. His research focuses on digital forensics, forensic science, misinformation, image analysis, and human perception. He earned his bachelor’s degree in computer science and applied mathematics from the University of Rochester in 1989 and his doctorate in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997. Following a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in brain and cognitive sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he joined the faculty at Dartmouth College in 1999 where he remained until 2019. He was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and was named a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.

Mariette DiChristina

Mariette DiChristina is dean of Boston University’s College of Communication and a professor of the practice in journalism. Before arriving at BU in 2019, DiChristina was the first female editor-in-chief and executive vice president of Scientific American, as well as executive vice president of the magazines division of its publisher, Springer Nature. She is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where she co-chairs the Climate Communications Initiative committee for the U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine; serves on the Practice and Science of Civic Science Advisory Committee for the Civic Science Fellows program; and is a member of the executive board of Society for Science, publisher of Science News. For the past several years, DiChristina has also chaired the Steering Group for the “Top 10 Emerging Technologies” for the World Economic Forum.

Sears Merritt

Sears Merritt is head of Enterprise Technology & Experience
at MassMutual and oversees technology strategy—bringing together technology and data, digital experience, platform transformation, and enterprise cybersecurity. Before that, he founded a start-up that designed and implemented a real-time machine-learning and inference platform for predicting within competition events in college and professional basketball games. Before that, he was responsible for architecting one of the nation’s first regional telehealth networks, in Colorado. Sears holds a PhD in computer science, MS in telecommunications, and BS in electrical engineering from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and an MBA from the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Sanaz Mobasseri

Sanaz Mobasseri is an assistant professor of management and organizations at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. Her research investigates how organizational and social network processes shape gender and race differences among employees in the workplace. Using field experimental and computational research methodologies, she examines the roles of culture, cognition, and emotion in organizations. Mobasseri completed her PhD in the Management of Organizations Department at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Previously, she worked in finance in the US and UK. She also holds a Master of Public Policy from UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy and a Bachelor of Science in Finance from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Ngozi Okidegbe

Ngozi Okidegbe is a Moorman-Simon Interdisciplinary Career Development Associate Professor of Law and assistant professor of computing & data sciences at Boston University. Her focus is in the areas of law and technology, evidence, criminal procedure, and racial justice. Her work examines how the use of predictive technologies in the criminal justice system impacts racially marginalized communities. Previously, she was an assistant professor of law at Cardozo School of Law, and earlier she served as a law clerk for Justice Mbuyiseli Madlanga of the Constitutional Court of South Africa and for the Justices of the Court of Appeal for Ontario. She holds a Bachelor of Civil Law and an LLB from McGill University’s Faculty of Law and an LLM from Columbia Law School.

Chris Wells

Chris Wells is associate professor of emerging media studies at Boston University. He worked in environmental politics before earning an MA and PhD in communication at the University of Washington, where he focused on political communication and early social media. In his research, he uses a variety of methods, both conventional and computational, to study how news media coverage takes shape, how citizens learn about politics, and how they choose to participate. His most recent work is exploring how people can understand the many different media around us as making up an interactive media system. He holds a BA in linguistics from Cornell University.