CONFERENCE SPEAKERS

Antwi Akom is a data scientist, health technologist, and community informatics research methodologist. He is a professor and founding director of the Social Innovation and Universal Opportunity Lab, a joint research lab between the University of California at San Francisco and San Francisco State Unviersity in the only College of Ethnic Studies in the United States. He is the co-founder of IC, the Institute for Sustainable, Economic, Educational, and Environmental Design. He has an extensive background in building collaborative, community-facing technology projects, and new models of urban innovation that help cities become smarter, more equitable, just, and sustainable. He is also the co-founder of Streetwyze, a mobile, mapping, and SMS platform that was founded to give underrepresented and underserved communities a voice in co-designing the product, places, and spaces that impact their everyday lives .

Key areas of his research include social determinants of health, health information technologies, health literacy, GIS, people sensing, food security, big data, community based participatory action research, and interdisciplinary research; collaboration and mentoring of junior faculty and trainees on race, pace, place, and waste. He has been a White House Opportunity Project Innovation Fellow, and is involved in multiple National Institute of Health grants and is actively engaged in mentoring of doctoral students, post-doctoral scholars and junior faculty.

Tessa Cruz is the director of engagement and design at Streetwyze. She has many years of experience in community engagement facilitation, community-based research, and geospatial data collection.

Catherine D’Ignazio is an assistant professor of urban science and planning at MIT. She is also director of the Data + Feminism Lab, which uses data and computational methods to work towards gender and racial equity, particularly as they relate to space and place. D’Ignazio is a scholar, artist/designer, and hacker mama who focuses on feminist technology, data literacy, and civic engagement. With Rahul Bhargava, she built the platform Databasic.io, a suite of tools and activities to introduce newcomers to data science. Her 2020 book from MIT Press, Data Feminism, co-authored with Lauren F. Klein, charts a course for more ethical and empowering data science practices. Her research at the intersection of technology, design, and social justice has been published in Science & Engineering Ethics, the Journal of Community Informatics, and the proceedings of Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM SIGCHI) and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (ACM CSCW). Her art and design projects have won awards and been exhibited at the Venice Biennial and the ICA Boston.

Lauren Klein is an associate professor in the Departments of English and Quantitative Theory and Methods at Emory University, where she also directs the Digital Humanities Lab. Before moving to Emory, she taught in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. Klein works at the intersection of digital humanities, data science, and early American literature, with a research focus on issues of gender and race. She has designed platforms for exploring the contents of historical newspapers, modeled the invisible labor of women abolitionists, and recreated forgotten visualization schemes with fabric and addressable LEDs. In 2017, she was named one of the “rising stars in digital humanities” by Inside Higher Ed. She is the author of An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and, with Catherine D’Ignazio, Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020). With Matthew K. Gold, she edits Debates in the Digital Humanities, a hybrid print-digital publication stream that explores debates in the field as they emerge. Her current project, Data by Design: An Interactive History of Data Visualization, 1786-1900, was recently funded by an National Endowment for the Humanities-Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication.

Rayne Laborde is the associate director of cityLAB at UCLA, a design research center concentrating on urban spatial justice. Laborde is an architect, urban planner, and interdisciplinary researcher whose work combines community collaboration and planning methods with design practice that prioritizes public engagement while raising questions of agency and spatial justice. Her career began in human rights, including judicial advising to the United Nations and partnerships with the Kofi Annan Foundation through the International Center for Transitional Justice. A recipient of numerous grants and awards, she has contributed to, designed, and curated exhibitions across the world, including installations at the 2014 Venice Biennale and installations for the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Melbourne, and the UCLA Perloff Hall gallery.

Andrea M. Matwyshyn is founding director of the Policy Innovation Lab of Tomorrow (PILOT) Lab and a professor of law and engineering at Penn State. She is an academic and author whose work focuses on technology, information policy, and law, particularly information security, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and machine learning, consumer privacy, intellectual property, health technology, and technology workforce pipeline policy. Previously, she was a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University where she served as co-director of the Center for Law Innovation and Creativity. She is a faculty affiliate at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School and a senior fellow of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. Matwyshyn has worked in both the public and private sectors. In 2014, she served as the senior policy advisor academic in residence at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. She has testified in Congress on issues of information security regulation, and she maintains ongoing policy engagements. Prior to becoming an academic, she was a corporate attorney in private practice, focusing on technology transactions.

Euneika Rogers-Sipp is a creative researcher at the Destination Design School of Agricultural Estates in Atlanta. Working at the intersection of conceptual and material practice, she develops projects that deal with the natural environment’s role in culture, examining the significance of mainstream industrial production in developed countries and local production in developing countries. Her current work explores the social and philosophical dimensions of reparation ecology, the curious intersections of the humane and inhumane, and art as a means of engagement, education, critique, and healing. Rogers-Sipp, under the name Ndg Bunting, facilitates, globally, curriculum design, workshops, and ritual spaces that address ecological crises.

Lily Song is an urban planner and activist-scholar. She is an assistant professor of race and social justice in the built environment at Northeastern University, jointly appointed between the School of Architecture and the School of Public Policy and Urban Planning. Her research and scholarship focus on the relations between urban infrastructure and redevelopment initiatives, socio-spatial inequality, and race, class, and gender politics in American cities and other decolonizing contexts. Her work both analyzes and informs infrastructure-based mobilizations and experiments that center the experiences and insights of historically marginalized groups as bases for reparative planning and design. Song was previously a lecturer in urban planning and design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), where she was founding coordinator of Harvard CoDesign, a GSD initiative to strengthen links between design pedagogy, research, practice, and activism. She holds a doctorate in urban and regional planning from MIT, a master’s deree urban and regional planning from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a bachelor’s degree in ethnic studies from the University of California, Berkeley.

Alexandra Staub is a professor of architecture at Penn State and an affiliate faculty member of Penn State’s Rock Ethics Institute. Her research focuses on how our built environment shapes, and is shaped by, our understanding of culture. This interest leads her to examine not just what we build, but also how we get there: design processes and their social implications, the economic, ecological, and social sustainability of architecture and urban systems, interpretations of private and public spaces, architectural ethics understood as questions of power and empowerment, and how social class, race, ethnicity, and gender shape our expectations for the use of space. She has presented and published her work extensively including the books Conflicted Identities: Housing and the Politics of Cultural Representation, published by Routledge in 2015, and The Routledge Companion to Modernity, Space and Gender, published in 2018. She is currently working on a book titled Architecture and the Search for Social Sustainability

Daniel Susser, a philosopher by training, works at the intersection of technology, ethics, and policy. His research aims to highlight normative issues in the design, development, and use of digital technologies, and to clarify conceptual issues that stand in the way of addressing them through law and other forms of governance. Specifically, much of his work has focused on questions about privacy, online influence, and the ethics of automation. Daniel is the Haile Family Early Career Professor and assistant professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology, research associate in the Rock Ethics Institute, and an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Philosophy at Penn State

Ife Salema Vanable directs i/van/able, an architectural workshop and think tank located in the Bronx. She is a practitioner, theorist, and architectural historian and is the inaugural KPF Visiting Scholar at the Yale University School of Architecture. She is also a doctoral candidate in architectural history and theory at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), where she examines high-rise, high-density, residential towers erected in New York under the 1955 “Limited-Profit Housing Companies Law,” known as Mitchell-Lama, in an effort to expand the scope and range of histories and theories of multi-family urban housing and complicate narratives of public private partnership for its development. She has taught at the Yale School of Architecture, Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union, and Columbia GSAPP. She has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a History and Theory Prize from Princeton University, a Columbia University Buell Center Fellowship, and the New York State Council on the Arts Grant.