Directory

Michael Macy received his B.A. and Ph.D at Harvard, along with an M.A. from Stanford. He is currently Goldwin Smith Professor of Arts and Sciences in Sociology and Director of the Social Dynamics Laboratory at Cornell, where he has worked since 1997.

With major support from the National Science Foundation, his research team has used computational models, online laboratory experiments, and digital traces of device-mediated interaction to explore familiar but enigmatic social patterns, such as circadian rhythms, the emergence and collapse of fads, the spread of self-destructive behaviors, cooperation in social dilemmas, the critical mass in collective action, the spread of high-threshold contagions on small-world networks, the polarization of opinion, segregation of neighborhoods, and assimilation of minority cultures. His team has used data from Twitter and Spotify to track diurnal and seasonal mood changes across the globe, national telephone logs to measure the economic correlates of network structure, and both social media and phone logs to reveal  "social wormholes" that create high-bandwidth connections across vast network distances.

Recent research has focused on political polarization, including a study on why liberals drink lattes and how polarization extends even to the consumption of books on popular science. His team’s research has been published in leading journals, including Science, PNAS, Nature Human Behaviour, Science Advances, American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, and Annual Review of Sociology.
 

Drew Margolin is an associate professor within the Cornell Department of Communication.

The internet, and social media in particular, have made individual and institutional discourse visible like never before. Yet the mechanisms that shape the production of discourse — what leads individuals or institutions to speak up, whom do they address, what do they say — is not yet well understood. Margolin's research focuses on understanding these dynamics through the quantitative aggregation of collective communication behavior. In particular, his approach emphasizes the role that accountability, credibility, and legitimacy within social networks and communities play in shaping observable discourse.
 

Steve Marschner is a professor of computer science, and currently serves as the associate dean for research in the Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information science. His research and teaching are in computer graphics and vision, centered around how optics and mechanics determine the appearance of materials, with interests in realistic rendering, material models (optical and mechanical), appearance capture, simulation, and computational photography. Some questions that run through his work are “How can we get objects to appear to be made from exactly the right kind of material?” and “How can we cleverly use cameras to help us measure the information we need to make great images?” Marschner received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1998, and held research positions at HP Laboratories, Microsoft Research, and Stanford University before he rejoined Cornell in 2002. He is also a part-time research scientist at NVIDIA Research. He is an ACM Fellow and member of the SIGGRAPH Academy, and has received a Sloan Research Fellow, an NSF CAREER Award, and an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Technical Achievement Award.

Nathan is founder of the Citizens and Technology Lab (formerly CivilServant), a public-interest research group at Cornell that organizes citizen behavioral science and behavioral consumer protection research for digital life. CAT Lab has worked with communities of tens of millions of people on reddit, Wikipedia, and Twitter to test ideas for preventing harassment, broadening gender diversity on social media, responding to human/algorithmic misinformation, managing political conflict, and auditing social technologies. Nathan is also pioneering industry-independent evaluations on the impact of tech platform policies in society.

From 2017-2019, Nathan was an associate research scholar at Princeton University in Psychology, the Center for Information Technology, and Sociology. In 2017, Nathan completed his Ph.D. at the MIT Media Lab with Ethan Zuckerman on the governance of human and machine behavior in an experimenting society (video) (thesis). Nathan also spent several years as a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Before MIT, Nathan worked in tech startups that have reached hundreds of millions of phones, helped start a series of education and journalistic charities, and studied English/postcolonial literature at the University of Cambridge and Elizabethtown College. His writings have appeared in The Atlantic, PBS, the Guardian, and other international media.

Nathan’s work is regularly covered by international media, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, NPR All Things Considered, WIRED, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Boston Globe, Canadian Broadcasting Company, FastCompany, Fortune, Chronicle of Higher Education, Nieman Journalism Review, and the Columbia Journalism Review, to name a few.

When not doing research, teaching, and organizing, Nathan enjoys cycling, sailing, facilitating gatherings for creative learning, having conversations about technology and faith, and working on projects that make you laugh, then think.
 

David S. Matteson is a professor of statistics and data science at Cornell University and director of the National Institute of Statistical Sciences. He is also director of graduate studies in data science, and founding executive committee member for the Cornell Center for Data Science for Enterprise and Society. His research centers on statistical methods for modeling complex human and natural processes and systems, with expertise in dynamic, spatial, functional, and network data science and machine learning. He received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation, the Chancellor’s Award for Scholarship and Creative Activities from the State University of New York, the inaugural Ann S. Bowers Research Excellence Award, Faculty Research Awards from the Xerox/PARC Foundation and LinkedIn, and is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA) and Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS). He has served as lead PI and director for several National Science Foundation-funded collaborative institutes, and he founded and serves as editor-in-chief for the new open access ASA journal Data Science in Science.

David Mimno is a professor and chair of the Department of Information Science. He holds a Ph.D. from UMass Amherst and was previously the head programmer at the Perseus Project at Tufts and a researcher at Princeton University. His work has been supported by the Sloan foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Science Foundation.

Francesca Molinari is a professor in the economics department. Her research focuses on econometric theory and applied econometrics. She got her PhD in Economics from Northwestern University and her BS in Economics from the Universita degli Studi di Torino. 
 

Kristina Monakhova is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell. She works on co-designing optics and algorithms to create better, smaller, and more capable cameras and microscopes.

Greg Morrisett is the Jack and Rilla Neafsey Dean and Vice Provost of Cornell Tech, Cornell University’s state-of-the-art campus in New York City that develops leaders and technologies for the AI era through foundational and applied research, graduate education, and new ventures. As the second dean of Cornell Tech, he has led the campus since 2019 and is responsible for the academic quality and direction of its degree programs as well as for efforts to recruit faculty, researchers, and students from around the world. His efforts have built pathways to expand access to the field as well as to engage industry partners and early-stage investors, further accelerating Cornell Tech’s contribution to New York City’s innovation economy.

Andrew Myers is the Class of 1912 Professor of Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT in 1999, advised by Barbara Liskov.

Mor Naaman is Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs and the Don and Mibs Follett professor of information science at Cornell Tech, the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, and the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.

Rajalakshmi Nandakumar is an Assistant Professor at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and in the Information Science department at Cornell University. She received her Ph.D. from University of Washington in Computer Science and Engineering in 2019. Her research focuses on developing wireless sensing technologies that enable novel applications in various domains including mobile health, user interfaces and IoT networks. She developed the first contactless smartphone-based sleep apnea diagnosis system that was licensed by ResMed Inc. and now used by millions of users for sleep staging. She was recognized with the UW Medicine Judy Su Clinical Research award, Paul Baran Young Scholar award by the Marconi Society and also named as the rising star in EECS by MIT.

Yang Ning is an associate professor of statistics and data science. The theme of his research is to develop statistical methods and theory to quantify the uncertainty (confidence interval and hypothesis test) in modern data sets, which are characterized by high dimensionality, complexity, and heterogeneity. He enjoys working at the interface of mathematical statistics, machine learning, and stochastic optimization. He is also interested in applied projects in genomics, neuroscience, epidemiology, and clinical trials. 

Helen Nissenbaum is the Andrew H. and Ann R. Tisch Professor of information science at Cornell Tech and the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. She is also the director of the Digital Life Initiative, which was launched in 2017 at Cornell Tech to explore societal perspectives surrounding the development and application of digital technology, focusing on ethics, policy, politics, and quality of life.

Michael Nussbaum is a professor of mathematics. His research program focuses on asymptotic methods in quantum statistics, in particular on hypothesis testing and discrimination between states of quantum systems. Further topics are the equivalence theory of statistical experiments, asymptotic inference in locally stationary time series and adaptive nonparametric hypothesis testing.
 

Andrew Owens is an associate professor of computer science at Cornell Tech and the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. His research aims to create multimodal systems that learn to see, hear, and touch without human-labeled training data. Instead, these systems learn from co-occurring sensory signals, such as the correlations between the visual and audio streams of a video. His work has enabled applications that include producing soundtracks for silent videos, robotic manipulation with vision and touch, detecting AI-generated images, and generating visual illusions.

Kevin Packard is a Lecturer of Statistics and Data Science in Cornell's ILR School.