Fellows 2017-18: Biographical Sketches

During her fellowship year, Carrie Cihak will focus on three inter-related components to advance evidence-based policymaking. She will: 1) develop practices to support sustained and meaningful collaboration between academic researchers and governments; 2) explore the science and evidence-base of belonging and social engagement with an eye toward what government can do to support it; and 3) will advance evidence-based partnerships with academic institutions such as Stanford’s Center on Longevity.

As Chief of Policy for the highest-ranking elected official of the 13th largest county in the United States, Cihak is responsible for identifying the highest priority policy areas and community outcomes for leadership focus and for developing and launching innovative solutions to issues that are complex, controversial and cross-sectoral. She is an architect of some of the administration’s key initiatives such as Best Starts for Kids and the County’s nationally-recognized work on equity and social justice. Prior to her work in Executive Constantine’s administration, Cihak served for eight years as a senior-level analyst for the King County Council and as lead staff for the King County Board of Health. She is trained as a PhD-level (ABD — University of Michigan) economist specializing in Japan, and served as staff economist on international trade and finance for President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers.

Jennifer Crocker will spend her fellowship year working on two related projects. She will analyze and write up the results of the first study of the effects of mental health stigma and social motivation on college roommate relationship dynamics over time, providing insight into how stigma results in negative outcomes for students who begin college with a diagnosis of anxiety or depression, and what factors protect against negative outcomes — information critically needed to design effective interventions. She will also write a broader theory paper on the interaction of egosystem and ecosystem social motivations and how they shape interpersonal relationships, health, and psychological well-being.

Crocker’s research falls at the interface of the self, stigma, social motivation, and close relationships. Using a variety of research methods, her work explores how these two evolved motivational systems shape people’s construals of their social worlds, their social interactions, and the consequences of these processes for relationships and psychological well-being over time. 

Crocker is Ohio Eminent Scholar in Social Psychology and professor of psychology at the Ohio State University. She received her BA from Michigan State University and her PhD from Harvard University, and has been a faculty member at Northwestern University, the University of Buffalo, and the University of Michigan before joining the faculty at Ohio State University in 2010. 

For more information, see Crocker’s laboratory web site at http://faculty.psy.ohio-state.edu/crocker/lab/.

Tasha Fairfield will be working on a book project with Andrew Charman that aims to explicate and improve qualitative social science by drawing on expositions of Bayesian probability as “extended logic” from the natural sciences. Bayesianism is enjoying a revival in many fields, and it can provide a rigorous but as of yet underappreciated foundation for inference in qualitative research. Following Bayesian reasoning more explicitly may also enhance research transparency, which is a growing concern considering the replication crisis in social science.

Fairfield is a comparative political scientist whose empirical research focuses on democracy, inequality, and redistribution. Her book, Private Wealth and Public Revenue: Business Power and Tax Politics in Latin America (CUP 2015), won the Latin American Studies Association 2016 Donna Lee Van Cott Award for the best book on political institutions.   

Fairfield is an assistant professor at the London School of Economics. She holds a PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, an MA in Latin American studies and an MS in physics from Stanford University, and an AB in physics from Harvard University.

To learn more about her research, visit Fairfield’s personal website: www.tashafairfield.wixsite.com/home.

Ariela Gross will spend the year working on a book manuscript with Alejandro De La Fuente (Harvard University) comparing law, race, slavery and freedom in the Americas. The book will be a transnational and comparative study of the ways in which people of color challenged the boundaries of slavery and freedom, black and white, using Cuba, Louisiana and Virginia as case studies over several centuries. Gross and De La Fuente use the techniques of cultural-legal history, studying the interactions of ordinary people with law in their everyday lives. 

Gross is the John B. & Alice R. Sharp Professor of Law & History at the University of Southern California, and co-director of the USC Center for Law, History, and Culture. She is the author of Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom (Princeton 2000) and the award-winning What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (Harvard 2008). In addition to writing about law, race and slavery in the past, she writes on race, law and the memory of slavery in contemporary law and politics, including a 2017 symposium in Law and History Review, “A Crime Against Humanity”: Slavery and The Boundaries of Legality, Past and Present. This year, her research is being supported by an American Council for Learned Societies Collaborative Research Fellowship, and she has been a Guggenheim Fellow, an NEH Huntington Research Fellow, and an ACLS Burkhardt Fellow.

Learn more at http://weblaw.usc.edu/faculty/?id=219.

Phillip Hammack studies sexual and gender identity diversity in social and political context. At CASBS, he will be examining the impact of community climate toward sexual and gender identity diversity on the psychological well-being of adolescents. He will be writing a series of articles based on his recently completed study of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) adolescents in two distinct regions of California: the Central Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Hammack was trained as an interdisciplinary social scientist at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Human Development. His early research on youth in settings of political conflict was recognized by early career awards from the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP), the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI), and the Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict, and Violence. Hammack has published over 50 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and is author of Narrative and the Politics of Identity: The Cultural Psychology of Israeli and Palestinian Youth (Oxford, 2011), co-editor of The Story of Sexual Identity: Narrative Perspectives on the Gay and Lesbian Life Course (Oxford, 2009), and editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Social Psychology and Social Justice. His research has been funded by the Spencer Foundation, the United States Institute of Peace, the National Science Foundation, the William T. Grant Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health.

Hammack is professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 2017-18, he is a William T. Grant Foundation Scholar at CASBS.

Read more about Hammack’s Politics, Culture, & Identity Lab at UCSC here.

Libra Hilde will spend the year completing a book on fatherhood and slavery. ‘Our Father’: Slavery and Fatherhood in the American South examines what it meant to be an enslaved man and a father, the adaptive nature of the slave family, and how the slave community envisioned masculine duty. Despite a system that enforced neglect and limited contact with children, undermined a man’s authority and ability to protect loved ones, and broke apart families, many enslaved fathers managed to serve as caretakers and exert influence over their sons and daughters. The book also explores the sexual exploitation of slavery, how mixed-race people felt about their white fathers, and enslaved women’s reactions to children born of rape and concubinage.

Hilde’s research focuses on race and gender in the U.S. South with a particular emphasis on slavery and the Civil War. You can see her discussing her first book, Worth A Dozen Men: Women and Nursing in the Civil War South here: https://www.c-span.org/video/?424699-1/worth-dozen-men

Hilde is an associate professor of history at San Jose State University. She received her BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and her PhD from Harvard University.

Laura Kray’s research examines the processes through which stereotypes, or beliefs about immutable differences between social groups, reinforce social hierarchy by influencing how conflict is resolved between members of social groups varying in status and power. By examining the psychological factors that influence how scarce resources are allocated, her research sheds light on the interpersonal power dynamics underlying societal-level differences between men and women.

During her fellowship year, Kray aspires to write a trade book that challenges the narrative that gender inequality in pay and career advancement reflects women’s failure to negotiate effectively. Instead, she will argue that gender inequality largely reflects societal biases that undermine women’s strengths by reinforcing erroneous stereotypes. The applied goals are to identify and remove the obstacles that prevent women and men from experiencing equal treatment and opportunity in competitive, interpersonal contexts.

Kray is a professor of leadership at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. Kray earned a BA degree from the University of Michigan in organizational studies and a PhD in psychology from the University of Washington. She completed a post-doctoral fellowship in dispute resolution at Northwestern University and was an assistant professor at the University of Arizona before moving to Berkeley.

To learn more about Kray, visit her faculty webpage: http://facultybio.haas.berkeley.edu/faculty-list/kray-laura/.

Tim Liao has recently focused on two seemingly unrelated areas of research — the evaluation and measurement of distributional inequality and the analysis of life course sequences. Distributional inequality describes how social groups may differ in occupying the same quantiles (such as the top 1%, 5%, etc.). During his fellowship year, Liao plans to bring the two strands of research together by developing a method for building and analyzing an individual’s distributional inequality profiles over the life course and across generations. This will allow scholars to investigate intragenerational and intergenerational inequality dynamics. This research will be significant to scholars not only in sociology but also in the broader social and behavioral sciences.

Liao is professor of sociology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he also is professor of statistics by courtesy and directs the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies. He earned his PhD from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He has held visiting appointments at University of Cambridge, Yale University, University College London, Luxembourg Income Study, Chinese University of Hong Kong, and University of Melbourne. He was Editor of Sociological Methodology (2009-2015) and is a Deputy Editor of Demography.

John Markoff will use his fellowship year to continue work on a biography of Stewart Brand, the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog. The book is a social history following the path of a man who during the past five decades has created a particular Northern California mindset that has now swept the world. Markoff will also be a 2017-18 Berggruen fellow at CASBS, focusing on the impact of artificial intelligence and robotics on aging populations in the advanced world.

While at the New York Times he reported on computer security issues and wrote about technology advances such as the World Wide Web and Google’s self-driving car project. He was previously a visiting scholar at CASBS in 2014-15 while he was writing Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground between Humans and Robots (Ecco Press, 2016).

Markoff reported on Silicon Valley, computing, and technology for four decades. He retired from the New York Times at the end of 2016, and in January 2017 joined the Computer History Museum as a staff historian. He has an MA in sociology from the University of Oregon.

Read more about his work here: https://www.nytimes.com/by/john-markoff.

During his fellowship year, Abdul Noury will focus on legislative decision making in normal times and times of crises. He will work on voting behavior, party switching, and coalition formation in legislatures with a particular focus on the European Parliament. He will analyze how the global economic and financial crises, and the great migration crisis, shape legislative behavior.

Noury is a political economist working at the intersection of political science and economics. His past research focused on questions of ideology, nationality, and party systems within the European Union and beyond. In 2007, he co-authored the landmark book, Democratic Politics in the European Parliament (Cambridge University Press, 2007), which the American Political Science Association recognized with the Richard F. Fenno Prize for the best book published that year in the field of legislative studies. His work has appeared in various academic journals, including American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Comparative Economics, Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, European Journal of Political Economy, Economic Policy, Economic Letters, Legislative Studies Quarterly.

Noury is an associate professor in the division of the social sciences at New York University Abu Dhabi. He earned his BA, MA, and PhD in economics from the Université Libre de Bruxelles. In 2004-2005, he was a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley.

Working off the completion of her manuscript Design Unbound. Designing for Emergence in a WhiteWater World (MIT Press, fall 2018), which presents a new lens and set of tools for conceptualizing, investigating and acting in the contemporary world, and a series of projects that have built on the theory and practice of DesUnbound, Ann Pendleton-Jullian will spend her fellowship year developing a framework for interrogating and visualizing complex contexts and highly context contingent problems. By interweaving advances in the social sciences, information sciences, and visualization techniques with the methodologies coming from DesUnbound, and using a specific project as a vehicle to test bed concepts and methods, this framework will begin as a sketch to be filled in.

Pendleton-Jullian is an architect, writer, and educator whose work explores the interchange between architecture, landscape, culture, science, and technology within complex contexts.

Pendleton-Jullian is professor and former director of the Knowlton School of Architecture at Ohio State University, Distinguished Visiting Professor out of the President’s Office at Georgetown University, Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School of Public Policy and periodically co-teaches world building studios at USC’s School of Cinema. From 1993‐2007, she was professor of architecture at MIT. She serves on the International Panel of Experts for the Urban Redevelopment Association Singapore and is a core member of the Highlands Forums Group–a cross‐disciplinary network established in 1995 by the Secretary of Defense to examine questions of emerging interest to national defense and security.

For full CV and description of some recent publications, see www.pragmaticimagination.com.

Hector Postigo’s research focuses on the structures and processes established between technology, science, law and society. His most recent research has focused on socio-computational systems and how they shape and are shaped by social movements, video games, intellectual property, and privacy law. His research has been funded by National Science Foundation and the European Commission 7th Programme. Along with research articles in the biological sciences, communication and legal studies he has authored the book, The Digital Rights Movement: The Role of Technology in Subverting Digital Copyright (MIT Press, 2012) and is co-editor of the book Branding Privacy Through Accountability (Palgrave Press, 2012).

At CASBS, Postigo will focus on analyzing cell phone footage documenting police and state actors’ confrontations with the public, the role of that footage in shaping recent jurisprudence and its potential for shaping emerging accountability policies for police and state actors. Postigo has spent the last two years amassing a database of that footage and its attendant legal and news reporting record. Because footage is dispersed across social media, sharing platforms, court records and in news reports that database will serve as a curated public resource for research on the topic for future scholars and activists.

Postigo is associate professor of media studies and production at Temple University and, until last spring, visiting fellow at Yale School of Law’s Information Society Project. He is co-founder of Culture Digitally, a research blog for multidisciplinary research. He received his PhD in science and technology studies from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and his MS in physiology and neurobiology from the University of Connecticut.

The Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi is an innovative thinker, philosopher, educator and polymath monk. He serves as Director of Ethics Initiative at MIT Media Lab and is the Founding President and CEO of The Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a center dedicated to inquiry, dialogue, and education on the ethical and humane dimensions of life.

Following the catastrophic disaster caused by Tsunami in 2005, The Venerable Priyadarshi founded the Prajnopaya Foundation to develop innovative and sustainable ways to alleviate suffering in developing countries. He convened and advised a team of designers and architects from MIT, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and Cambridge University to develop the Tsunami Safe(r) Houses: low cost, high-resistance homes for families in Sri Lanka. The foundation has been active in health care and education endeavors in India, including systematic methods to curtail tuberculosis and bring health care to rural areas. He has been interviewed by NPR, BBC, and CNN, and articles on him and his work have appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and La Republica.

During his time at CASBS, he will mostly be exploring ethical and governance frameworks around artificial intelligence. The Venerable Priyadarshi serves on the board of several academic, humanitarian, and religious organizations. He is a recipient of several recognitions and awards, including a 2013 Distinguished Alumni Award from Harvard University for his visionary contributions to humanity. In 2017-18, the Venerable Priyadarshi is a Berggruen fellow at CASBS.

Julio Ríos-Figueroa will spend the year analyzing the birth, development, and persistence of patronage networks within the Mexican Federal Judiciary in the last one hundred years. The project seeks to uncover the patronage networks created from 1917 to 1994, when the Supreme Court hand-picked lower court judges, and to gauge their effects on the performance of the Judicial Council that selects judges on merit since 1995. The broader goal is to understand what makes institutions work, what connects structure and agency, exploring the hidden bulk that lies underneath formal institutions: the norms, practices, and informal institutions that also shape individual’s behavior.

Ríos-Figueroa’s work focuses on comparative judicial institutions and the rule of law. His recent book, Constitutional Courts as Mediators (Cambridge University Press, 2016) combine insights from dialogic constitutionalism, international mediation, and comparative judicial politics into a theory on the role of constitutional courts in democratic conflict solving. The book analyzes the constitutional jurisprudence on military autonomy, the scope of military jurisdiction, and the regulation of the use of force in democracies where the armed forces are facing internal security challenges such as Colombia, Peru, and Mexico but also Israel, Turkey, and Pakistan.

Ríos-Figueroa got his PhD in politics from New York University. He is associate professor at CIDE in Mexico City.

More on his work can be found at: http://www.investigadores.cide.edu/julio.rios/.

Aaron Shaw will study knowledge production and collaboration in online communities like Wikipedia and the Zooniverse. Some of these community projects have mobilized large, diverse groups of contributors and generated valuable, high quality public information resources. However, many attempts to do so don’t get far. The research investigates factors that shape project outcomes in terms of their growth, participation, impact, and the qualities of the information they create.

Shaw is an assistant professor of communication studies at Northwestern University as well as a faculty associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Together with Benjamin Mako Hill, Shaw co-founded the Community Data Science Collective, a joint research group at Northwestern University and the University of Washington, Seattle. He holds degrees from the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University.

For more, see Shaw's website and the Community Data Science Collective wiki.

During her fellowship, Beth Van Schaack will be thinking rigorously and creatively about how the international community can better design and implement bespoke responses to communities at acute risk of mass violence, full-blown crises like Syria, and situations emerging from episodes of bloodshed.

Van Schaack is the Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor in Human Rights at Stanford Law School — where she teaches in the areas of international human rights, international criminal law, and atrocities prevention — and a faculty fellow with the Handa Center for Human Rights & International Justice at Stanford University. Prior to returning to academia, she served as Deputy to the Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues in the Office of Global Criminal Justice of the U.S. Department of State. She continues to serve as a Special Government Expert on the State Department’s Advisory Committee on International Law. At Stanford, she has also been a Visiting Scholar with the Center for International Security and Cooperation of the Freeman Spogli Institute. Prior to her State Department appointment, Van Schaack was professor of law at Santa Clara University School of Law, where she taught and wrote in the areas of human rights, transitional justice, international criminal law, public international law, international humanitarian law, and civil procedure.

Van Schaack has also been in private practice, in the areas of commercial law, intellectual property, international law, and human rights. Prior to entering private practice, Van Schaack was Acting Executive Director and Staff Attorney with The Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA) in San Francisco, and a law clerk with the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. She continues to advise a number of human rights and international justice organizations.

Van Schaack is a graduate of Stanford University and Yale University Law School.

Carolyn Warner will spend the year working on a book project examining how and why the military and the Catholic Church have responded to cases of sexual assault and sex abuse within their institutions as they have, and the conditions under which civil authorities and elected officials do or do not hold the institutions to account. The project, mostly focused on the US, Australia and the United Kingdom, also explores whether the presumed sacredness or sacrosanct auras of the institutions play a role in how the institutions respond and whether public authorities and citizens defer to them.

Warner works in the areas of religion and politics, and corruption, with an interest in the impact of institutions and beliefs on behavior. She is the author of several books, Confessions of an Interest Group (Princeton 2000), The Best System Money Can Buy: Corruption in the European Union (Cornell 2007), and Generating Generosity: Beliefs, Institutions and Public Goods Provision in Catholicism and Islam (Cambridge, in production), and a number of articles. A recipient of major grants (US National Science Foundation; Templeton/Science of Generosity; Henry Luce Foundation; US Army Research Institute) and fellowships (Jean Monnet Fellow, Hoover Institution National Fellow), her other research has been focused on understanding the role of religion in conflict, and on corruption in the global political economy.

Warner is professor of political science in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University. She holds a BA from the University of California San Diego, and an MA and PhD from Harvard University. For more information, go to carolynwarner.com.

Ernest Wilson will pull together five years of research on the competencies required for success in today’s post-industrial, digital society in a trade book on “Third Space Thinking,” a problem-solving model that complements traditional engineering and traditional business framings (www.uscthirdspace.com). His second project critiques the internal structures and external parameters of the communication field.

Wilson has written widely on global aspects of communication as a scholar and practitioner, especially the tensions between structure and agency. He co-founded the journal Information Technology and International Development, and co-edited a parallel book series, both at MIT Press. He served on the senior staff of the White House, and held positions at the US Information Agency, the World Bank, and has been an advisor to the US State Department, United Nations, the State Council of China, the Shanghai Media Group, and other bodies. He writes on ways scholarly knowledge can advance practical strategies.

A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he chairs its membership committee for communication and media, and works closely with the National Research Council, the American Academy of Engineering and other professional bodies. From 2007-2014 he was Walter H. Annenberg Chair, and Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California.