Class of 2024

Anthropology and Biological Science; Mentors - Jerry DeSilva and Mark McPeek

Klara Komza

Klara is an evolutionary anthropologist whose research focuses on skeletal shape variation in our extinct human relatives. Using quantitative genetics, a computational method derived from evolutionary biology, she investigates the evolutionary forces that shaped this diversity as our ancestors started walking upright and populating the world. As a Neukom Fellow, she will reconstruct the evolutionary forces that contributed to the diversification of our closest extinct relatives, members of the genus Homo. This genus encompasses a broad range of species, some more similar to modern humans than others, but their evolutionary history is unresolved. Klara will shed light on how these extinct relatives diversified as they evolved in Africa and dispersed to the rest of the world.

Government and Computer Science; Mentors - Jennifer Jerit, Brendan Nyhan, and Soroush Vosoughi

Lexi Palmer

Lexi studies the question of trust in politics: why citizens trust the institutions, representatives, and information that they do. This work incorporates a wide variety of methodology, including qualitative field work, original survey experiments, and developing novel tools for natural language processing. Her dissertation work focused on narratives as a mechanism of trust building, a project served by a new method for measuring the structure of a story in text. Other work has included a comparative study of political cynicism and work on the role of Large Language Models (LLMs) in political discussions.

As a Neukom Fellow, Lexi builds on this work with a particular focus on: how politicians represent morality in text, narratives as communicating personal efficacy, and how LLMs can be used effectively in social science research.

English, Creative Writing, Math and QSS; Mentors - James Dobson and Daniel Rockmore

Tyler Shoemaker

Tyler Shoemaker develops critical approaches to natural language processing (NLP). A digital humanist, he focuses on how NLP crosscuts the interpretive and theoretic frameworks of literary and media studies. He took a PhD with a dissertation on the poetics of machine reading and has since worked on a wide variety of data-driven projects. As a Neukom Fellow, Tyler conducts research on the rise of large language models. On the one hand, this means situating such models within a broader, media-historical account of NLP. On the other, it entails concrete experimentation aimed at testing what purchase contemporary language modeling might have on interpretive practice.

Engineering and Earth Sciences; Mentors - Klaus Keller, Erin Mayfield, and Erich Osterberg

Lynee Turek-Hankin

Lynée Turek-Hankins studies equitable climate change adaptation and mitigation responses for the interconnected housing and energy sectors. Her data-driven research approach is decision-relevant and rooted in collaborations with diverse stakeholders, such as state and municipal governments and community groups. During her PhD, Lynée combined data science and co-production to identify multisector drivers of residential extreme heat risk and assess response opportunities for the housing–energy nexus. She also studied procedural justice in knowledge production and decision-making processes. Lynée is an adjunct researcher at the RAND Corporation and was a chapter author for the Fifth U.S. National Climate Assessment. As a Neukom fellow, Lynée will experiment with emerging computational causal analysis and decision science techniques to evaluate the efficacy and equity impacts of responses for the housing-energy nexus and analyze how different interventions, sources of uncertainty, and objectives influence decision making. Lynée received her PhD from the University of Miami in environmental science and policy and her B.S.E. in mechanical engineering from Stanford University.