Griff Bibbey is a Bioengineering PhD student in the Mitragotri Lab for Drug Delivery at Harvard University and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. He is interested in engineering biomaterials, such as cellular backpacks, for use at the intersection of drug delivery, cell therapy, and regenerative medicine. He has a particular interest in applying my research in dermatology and oncology. He received his B.S. in Chemical & Biological Engineering from the University of Colorado Boulder, where he researched DNA-based self-assembly for tissue engineering and photoactive protein therapeutics. He previously worked in R&D at L'Oreal and Procter & Gamble (P&G).

Ben Schafer is an applied physics PhD student in Joost Vlassak and David Keith's research groups. He is a co-founder of MicroAvionics Inc., which aims to develop photophoretic levitation for near-space flight, and is a 2024 New Mexico LEEP fellow. He earned a BS in physics and chemistry from Hamilton College and has conducted research at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Mariam is a 3rd year PhD candidate in Electrical Engineering at the Nano-Design Group. Her research interests lie in designing and optimizing environmentally sustainable computing systems across the stack. The overarching goal of my research is to tackle climate change by developing an environmentally-sustainable path for computing systems. I particularly focus on optimizing environmentally-sustainable computing systems, which is an interdisciplinary endeavor that spans the entire computing stack: all the way from nanomaterials, devices and circuits up to architectures, algorithms and applications. 

Peter Chang is a research associate with HBS working on bias and fairness in machine learning. My research is focused on simulating, detecting, and mitigating bias at all stages of a machine learning model's use.

Conlan Olson is a research assistant working with Cynthia Dwork. Conlan received an A.B. in 2021 and a M.Ed. in 2023. Conlan will describe a current project on metric learning for individual fairness. It is based in theoretical computer science and statistics.

Kirsten Craft, is the Vice President of Strategic Partner Management at Fidelity Investments. Kirsten previously worked at Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) as the Director of Early-Stage Startups. With her extensive experience in the Boston startup scene, including roles at companies like Wistia, Tettra, and Ovia Health, Kirsten is now playing a pivotal role in building Fidelity into a valuable resource for startup founders, particularly in the Boston ecosystem. Her passion for supporting startups and leveraging Fidelity’s resources makes her an exciting addition to the entrepreneurial community

Kleida Martiro is a Partner at Glasswing Ventures with specialized expertise in data science, entrepreneurship, and product management. As the former Head of Data Science at SocialFlow (acquired by Piano.ai), she led the machine learning efforts for the software platform, including its AI-powered proprietary content classifier for automating editorial content categorization.

Biyonka Liang is a Ph.D. Candidate in Statistics at Harvard University. Her research focuses on developing statistical methods for adaptive experiments, particularly to address challenges in online experimentation and public health. She is a founding member of Data Adventure Day at Harvard, an event is designed to expose high school students to statistics and data science through hands-on activities and interactions with Harvard students, faculty, and staff. Outside of statistics, she enjoys alpine skiing and a figure skating.

Reid McIlroy-Young recently received his PhD from the University of Toronto in CS for his work on modeling human decision making using AI. He is currently a postdoc at SEAS working on solving fairness problems in hiring platforms using AI. Reid will introduce Maia Chess; an AI system that can understand humans by emulating player behavior, partnering with them, and identifying their style. Maia Chess models have been played over 3 million times by humans and is present in multiple commercial products.

Juan Perdomo is currently a postdoctoral fellow in Computer Science at the Harvard Center for Research on Computation and Society where he is hosted by Prof. Cynthia Dwork. Before coming to Harvard, he was a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley also in CS. His research is on the theoretical and empirical foundations of algorithmic decision making in society.

Jamie Tucker-Foltz is a 4th-year computer science PhD student advised by Ariel Procaccia and supported by a Google PhD Fellowship. He earned his undergraduate degree in computer science and mathematics from Amherst College, and a master's degree in computer science from the University of Cambridge on a Churchill Scholarship. His research focuses on applying techniques from theoretical computer science to improve political and economic institutions. He works on a range of topics in fair division, social choice theory, and algorithmic game theory, and is specially interested in algorithms for fair redistricting and gerrymandering detection.

Reena is pursuing her PhD in Applied Physics (co-advised by Eric Mazur and Joanna Aizenberg). Prior to this, she earned her BSc in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo, and worked in industry for 6 years as a researcher. Her current research is focusing on using laser optics for cellular therapy.

Runyu (Cathy) Zhang is a fifth year Ph.D. candidate in School of Engineering and Applied Science at Harvard University working with Prof. Na Li. Her research interest lies in learning, control and decision making in large scale multi-agent infrastructures.

Tao Lin is a 4th-year PhD student in Computer Science, advised by Prof. Yiling Chen. He has broad research interests in the intersection between Economics and Machine Learning, including auction design, information design, and their connections with machine learning algorithms. He did a research internship at ByteDance on the societal impact of recommender systems.

Vinny is a Principal at Engine Ventures. He was previously a consultant in the Private Equity Group at the London and Boston offices of Bain & Company. At Bain, he advised private equity and corporate clients on investments across industry sectors with a primary focus on healthcare.

He holds a PhD in Molecular Biology from, the University of Cambridge, an MSc in Biomedical Engineering, from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a BS in Biomedical Engineering, from the Czech Technical University.

Abe is a General Partner leading Robotics investments and incubation at AlleyCorp. Abe has more than 20 years of engineering experience, having spent time as a product and engineering leader in various roles at Alphabet, where he launched Play Books and Magazines at Android, built the Verily Life Science product teams and Boston office, and shipped several AI/ML and computer vision products across Google while building the Google Research product management team. Before that, he founded a Web 2.0 startup and worked on unmanned aerial vehicles in the defense industry.

Corey Pedersen is an Environmental Science and Engineering PhD student in Frank Keutsch's research group. He is interested in understanding the chemistry that occurs on aerosols in the stratosphere. His work involves laboratory experiments, high-altitude aircraft measurements, and global chemistry-climate modeling. Corey earned his BS in chemistry from the University of Wisconsin – Madison where he studied nano-film coatings on sea spray aerosols.

Yaowei Li is a PhD student in Environmental Science & Engineering in the Keutsch group at Harvard University. His research focuses on the interactions between chemistry and climate, especially the climate and chemical effects of aerosols in both the troposphere and stratosphere. He has also conducted research on urban air quality and drone-based atmospheric measurements. He holds a B.S. in Environmental Sciences and a B.A. in Economics from Peking University. He has participated in a few high-altitude aircraft campaigns and served as Co-PI for aerosol instruments. He is a former Vice President of the Harvard Chinese Students and Scholars Association (HCSSA).

Check back for more speakers to be added to the list as the event approaches!