Current Fellows

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Geography & Biology; Mentors- Justin Mankin, Jonathan Winters, and Matt Ayres

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Corey is an environmental scientist interested in climate change and its impacts on people and nature. During his PhD, he studied how weather has affected food crops historically, drawing lessons to help adapt agriculture to a more extreme climate. He also assessed the greenhouse gas emissions likely to result from the climate transition. As a Neukom Fellow, Corey is investigating how rising atmospheric carbon dioxide may change how crops and plants in general interact with climate extremes. In his research, he integrates diverse observational data with biophysical and statistical models. Corey is also an enthusiastic environmental and climate educator.

Publications, Conferences, & Courses

Anthropology & Geisel Medical School; Mentors – Zane Thayer and Brock Christensen

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Luisa studies the transgenerational transmission of trauma and adversity in communities experiencing chronic and acute stressors. Her research focuses on the ways in which historical trauma and structural violence are lived out through caregiving, examining the cultural and biological pathways that may buffer stress and augment resilience in communities of color. As a Neukom scholar, she will work with Dr. Zaneta Thayer and Dr. Brock Christensen to develop novel epigenomic menstruation-based biomarkers with associated computational and analytic techniques as a new methodology for articulating the links between reproductive health and stress.

Publications, Conferences, & Courses

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.