2023 Fellows

Biology Sciences and Geography; Mentors: Caitlin Hicks Pries and Justin Mankin

Sophie von Fromm

Sophie is a terrestrial biogeochemist. Her research focuses on the vulnerability of soil organic carbon to climate and land use change. During her PhD, she investigated factors and processes controlling soil organic carbon storage and persistence in Afrotropical soils. She also contributed to the development and maintenance of the International Soil Radiocarbon Database (ISRaD), which allows the study of soil organic carbon persistence at the global scale. As a Neukom Fellow, Sophie is improving the predictive power and accuracy of existing soil models for sub-Saharan Africa. She is passionate about rowing and loves to spend her free time outdoors.

Cognitive Science and Computer Science; Mentors - Luke Chang, Jonathan Phillips, Soroush Vosoughi, SouYoung Jin

Dae Houlihan

Dae studies the cognitive mechanisms of emotional intelligence. On one hand, human social cognition shows astounding flexibility and sophistication. On the other hand, it shows dramatic biases and limitations. Dae's work adopts an approach of "analysis by synthesis," building computational models to investigate how people accomplish the remarkable cognitive feats involved in everyday social interactions. He uses probabilistic programs and machine learning to model how social cognition works, when it is effective, and why it fails. By reverse-engineering human social cognition, his work also points towards how we might—and how we should not—build emotionally intelligent machines.

Philosophy & Computer Science; Mentors: Susan Brison and Andrew Campbell

Jacopo

Jacopo Domenicucci is a philosopher working primarily in Moral Philosophy, the Philosophy of Computing, and Social Philosophy. Jacopo is a specialist of trust — the moral psychology of trust, the virtues around trustworthiness, the philosophical and cultural evolution of the concept, and the impact of pervasive computing on trust models.

At the Neukom Institute, Jacopo focuses on ethics and computing, and specifically on the conceptual ethics of 'AI ethics'. He collaborates with computer scientists and with other philosophers and hopes to improve some of the conceptual resources that underpin the ethical regulation of computing technologies.