People
Faculty
Kaitlyn Filip
Kaitlyn Filip is an Assistant Professor of Library and Information Science at Chicago State University in the Department of Computing, Information, Mathematical Sciences & Technology. Kaitlyn first worked with SICSS as a post-doc in 2024. She has a PhD in Communication Studies, Rhetoric & Public Culture and a JD from Northwestern University. Her research is on data transparency in the US courts. Kaitlyn is also the Communication Director of SCALES OKN, a court data non-profit that works to make court data meaningfully public such that everyone can measure what’s happening in the legal system. She is also currently knitting a black sheep sweater like the one Princess Diana wore in 1983.
Kat Albrecht
Kat Albrecht is an Assistant Professor at the University of Tulsa College of Law 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
Danye Medhin
Danye Medhin is an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Bethune Cookman University and a policy analyst specializing in drug policy and criminal justice reform. He earned his PhD in Criminology from Georgia State University. His research blends casual inference and policy analytics, with a focus on how legal changes shape patterns of enforcement and inequality. Danye works extensively with large scale administrative datasets, including the FBI’s National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS) and the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR). His current work applies multiple imputation on a massive scale to address item level missingness in NIBRS, substantially improving its usability for policy analysis. Ultimately, this work will support a broader research agenda aimed at estimating the causal effects of cannabis legalization and related policies on arrest patterns across demographic groups. Outside of his academic work, Danye is an avid NBA 2K player, where he and his son lead a highly competitive crew.
Erin M. Ochoa
Erin is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Northwestern University and a graduate research fellow at the Center for Neighborhood Engaged Research and Science (Corners). Implementing computational and quantitative methods, her work focuses on evaluating community violence intervention programs. Erin was formerly a graduate research fellow at the Center for Spatial Data Science and was previously with the New Mexico Sentencing Commission and the New Mexico Statistical Analysis Center. She holds a Master’s in sociology from Northwestern University, a Master’s in Computational Social Science from the University of Chicago, and a Bachelor’s in criminology from the University of New Mexico. Erin is also an alum of SICSS Chicago, serving as the teaching assistant for SICSS Chicago in 2021.
Félix Morales
After working in microfluidics and tissue engineering, I decided to get busier with computers and data. As such, I was a student in the Quantitative and Systems Biology master’s program at Northwestern University, working in the Amaral Lab on clustering clinical courses of severe pneumonia patients using their electronic health records and integrating those records with the Human Phenotype Ontology. I have since returned to Northwestern as a research specialist in the Amaral Lab.
Scott Daniel
Scott Daniel is the senior software engineer at the SCALES-OKN, a data transparency non-profit focused on making court data more accessible and analyzable. He is also an accomplished touring musician and artist.Teaching Assistants
Sierra Bell
Sierra Bell is a Ph.D. candidate in the Criminal Justice and Criminology department at Georgia State University. She obtained her Bachelor’s degree and Master’s degree at the University of West Georgia where she has since returned to teach courses on criminology, terrorism, and juvenile justice. Sierra’s research interests involve developing new ways to operationalize and measure fear and fear of crime. She is currently completing her dissertation on understanding fear as an interdisciplinary social scientific concept.Participants
Shahan Ahmed
Shahan Ahmed is a computational social scientist interested in the intersection of social research, public data, health policy, and machine learning. His work applies computational methods to study social and health inequalities, improve evidence-based decision-making, and build accessible data tools. His research interests include health policy analytics, civic data infrastructure, survey research, misinformation detection, and computational approaches to understanding complex social systems.
Chelsea Armour
Chelsea Armour, M.A., is a research Associate in the Department of Psychology and a graduate student in the Master of Science in Data Science program at Virginia Tech. As co-director of the Memory Development and Policy Lab, her research focuses on prevention and response to sexual abuse occurring in populations with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). She is interested in leveraging data science to explore health and education disparities affecting people with IDD.
Raghav Bhutani
I am a second-year PhD student in Complex Systems and Data Sciences at the University of Vermont. My research interests lie at the intersection of mathematics and the social sciences, with a particular focus on the Indian subcontinent, a region that remains under-researched despite being home to the world’s largest population. Outside of research, I enjoy biking, hiking, skiing, and playing pool.
Daniel Copulsky
Daniel Copulsky teaches psychology at Indiana University Bloomington. He holds a PhD in Social Psychology from the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research interests include asexuality, nonmonogamy, and neurodiversity, with a focus on identity labels and identity development. He teaches courses on Human Sexuality, Abnormal Psychology, Social Psychology, and Research Methods. He also serves on the board of directors for the nonprofit Center for Positive Sexuality.
Utsav Gandhi
Utsav Gandhi is a doctoral student in Communication at the University of Illinois Chicago. He is broadly interested in political economy (business models and regulation) of social media, news, and generative AI. Most recently, he was a pre-doctoral Research Professional at the Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State, based at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. Utsav has over ten years of work experience in digital communications and marketing across nonprofit, civic, academic, and research organizations, as well as political and advocacy campaigns in technology policy. He holds a master's in public policy from the University of Chicago’s Harris School, where he completed extensive coursework in technology policy and digital media. He also currently serves as an editorial assistant for New Media & Society, supporting editor-in-chief Dr. Steve Jones. Originally from Mumbai, India, Utsav moved to Chicago in 2010 and enjoys volunteering at PAWS Chicago, the city’s largest no-kill animal shelter, in his free time.
Evan Gomish
Evan Gomish recently completed a master of science in information at the University of Michigan. Their research interests include gender and sexual identity, information and AI literacy, and classification and its consequences.
Rupal Mahajan
Rupal Mahajan is a Ph.D. student in Social Psychology at Northwestern University. Her research sits at the intersection of self-regulation, moral judgment, and interpersonal perception, with a focus on how people evaluate themselves and others. She is interested in combining experimental and computational approaches to understand how social norms, identity expression, and moral beliefs develop within online communities and digital environments.
Miftahul Jannat Mokarrama
I am a Ph.D. Student in Computer Science at Northern Illinois University, Dekalb, Illinois. I did my Master's in CS at NIU in 2023. I am experienced in research involving Large Language Models (LLMs), Machine learning, Data Science, Data Analytics, and Recommender Systems. Previously, I conducted research using research papers cited in Youth Policy and identified the relevance and impact of linguistics in the policy citation of research. Moreover, I worked on finding and analyzing the topics used both in Youth research and Policy. These involved collecting and analyzing policy documents and research papers from Overton and applying NLP, ML, Language Models, and statistical methods on real-world (linear/non-linear) data. I have served as a reviewer for several conferences and journal including but not limited to ACL, COLM, COLING, JCDL, IC2S2, ICSSI, WebSci IJDL. Last year (2025), I also participated in SICSS_UCLA and had a great experience meeting with people from diverse background. Therefore, this is my second time attending SICSS and I am excited about it. You may find more about my research journey in my Personal website: https://jannatmokarrama07.github.io/portfolio/ I would love to connect and collaborate with more people in the field of computational Social Science.Dare Olawunmi
Dare Olawunmi is a second-year PhD student in Economics at the Peter T. Paul College of Business and Economics, University of New Hampshire. His research interests lie at the intersection of energy, environmental, and health economics. He currently studies how wildfire smoke exposure and power grid failures jointly affect mortality rates across US counties. Dare holds a Bachelor's degree in Economics from Ekiti State University, Nigeria, and an M.A. in Analytical Economics from the University of New Hampshire.
Ganit Richter
Dr. Richter’s areas of research interest include hedonic information systems from a managerial, educational, social, and business perspective. Among the main themes of her research are mechanisms of rewards and incentives for motivation, and how gamification can be used in novel contexts, such as interpreting complex legal documents. Dr. Richter has won several prizes, best paper awards, and honors; including from the University of Oxford e-Research Centre, the University of Minneapolis, and KTH Royal Institute of Technology.
Marisa Ross
Dr. Marisa Ross is the Quantitative Research Director at the Center for Neighborhood Engaged Research and Science (CORNERS). Passionate about the translation of scientific research beyond the lab into evidence-based policy and practice, she collaborates with CORNERS’ diverse team of researchers to drive policy-relevant research studies concerning community violence intervention (CVI), gun violence prevention, and neighborhood safety and well-being. Marisa joined CORNERS as a postdoctoral fellow in 2021 following the completion of her PhD from the Neuroscience and Public Policy Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she used functional and structural neuroimaging tools to study brain networks and trauma-related psychopathology in women and girls with posttraumatic stress disorder. She also holds a Master’s of Public Affairs from the UW-Madison La Follette School of Public Affairs. Marisa enjoys visiting Chicago’s best dog-friendly parks and patios with her pup, Pesto, playing board games, and biking around the city with her husband.
Austin Roth
Austin Roth recently completed his Bachelor of Science in Criminal Justice Studies and Political Science and International Relations at Truman State University. His academic interests center on environmental criminology, public policy, and place management’s role in crime prevention. His undergraduate work examined the relationship between tourist destinations and crime, using geospatial data to analyze crime outcomes. He has presented his research at the Midwest Sociological Society annual conference and is interested in expanding his skills in data analysis, spatial methods, and computational social science. He hopes to apply these approaches to better understand social processes and inform evidence-based policy and practice.
Chenchen Shi
Chenchen Shi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre Pedagogy at The Central Academy of Drama (in Beijing). Her research focuses on evidence-based education, program evaluation, and meta-analysis. Currently, she is a collaborator of the Center for Research and Reform in Education at the Johns Hopkins University.
Naida Softic
Naida Softic is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Loyola University Chicago, where she studies international organizations, their institutional design and the law that governs them, with a focus on migration and development. Her work also examines how international regimes structure cooperation among states and shape the institutions that sustain them. She is especially interested in translating academic insight into policy and in bridging the gap between scholarship and practice. Before coming to the United States as a Fulbright scholar, she earned a law degree from the University of Sarajevo and worked with the European Union, United Nations, International Organization for Migration, USAID, and the Danish Refugee Council on projects that strengthen governance, address migration, and advance approaches grounded in human rights in complex humanitarian settings.
Sabah Tajin Tarique
Sabah Tajin Tarique is a PhD student in Urban Planning and Policy at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), where she works as a Graduate Research Assistant at the Urban Transportation Center (UTC). She holds a Master's in Geography and Environmental Resources with a GIS specialization from Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIUC) and a Bachelor's in Urban and Regional Planning from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET). Her research interests include transportation planning, electric vehicle policy and adoption, public transit, and geospatial analysis.
Jordyn Wald
Jordyn Wald is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Minnesota. Her research examines gender, culture, and symbolic boundaries, with a particular focus on how nation-states, organizations, algorithms, and people define the boundaries of masculinity and femininity. Her current work uses Reddit data to examine if and how labor shifts over the past decade have been changing discussions of the ideal heterosexual relationship and how these shifts may, in turn, reshape expectations surrounding masculinity and femininity. More broadly, she is interested in how computational methods and digital text-as-data can be harnessed by social scientists to investigate questions of culture, gender, and social change.