Department Directory

Allison Koenecke is an assistant professor of information science at Cornell Tech and the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. Her research on algorithmic fairness applies computational methods, such as machine learning and causal inference, to study societal inequities in domains from online services to public health.

Gilly Leshed is a Full Teaching Professor and the director of the MPS program in the Department of Information Science. Her teaching and research interests are in human-computer Interaction (HCI) and computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), in which she uses quantitative and qualitative methods and technology design to examine how individuals and groups accomplish tasks and socialize, and the roles that information technology play in these interactions. She supervises the Cornell Digital Tech & Innovation Project Team and is a faculty house fellow at the William Keeton House.

Karen Levy is an associate professor of information science, an associate member of the faculty at Cornell Law School, and field faculty in sociology, science and technology studies, media studies, and data science.

Michael Macy received his B.A. and Ph.D at Harvard, along with an M.A. from Stanford. He is currently Goldwin Smith Professor of Arts and Sciences in Sociology and Director of the Social Dynamics Laboratory at Cornell, where he has worked since 1997.

With major support from the National Science Foundation, his research team has used computational models, online laboratory experiments, and digital traces of device-mediated interaction to explore familiar but enigmatic social patterns, such as circadian rhythms, the emergence and collapse of fads, the spread of self-destructive behaviors, cooperation in social dilemmas, the critical mass in collective action, the spread of high-threshold contagions on small-world networks, the polarization of opinion, segregation of neighborhoods, and assimilation of minority cultures. His team has used data from Twitter and Spotify to track diurnal and seasonal mood changes across the globe, national telephone logs to measure the economic correlates of network structure, and both social media and phone logs to reveal  "social wormholes" that create high-bandwidth connections across vast network distances.

Recent research has focused on political polarization, including a study on why liberals drink lattes and how polarization extends even to the consumption of books on popular science. His team’s research has been published in leading journals, including Science, PNAS, Nature Human Behaviour, Science Advances, American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, and Annual Review of Sociology.
 

Drew Margolin is an associate professor within the Cornell Department of Communication.

The internet, and social media in particular, have made individual and institutional discourse visible like never before. Yet the mechanisms that shape the production of discourse — what leads individuals or institutions to speak up, whom do they address, what do they say — is not yet well understood. Margolin's research focuses on understanding these dynamics through the quantitative aggregation of collective communication behavior. In particular, his approach emphasizes the role that accountability, credibility, and legitimacy within social networks and communities play in shaping observable discourse.
 

Nathan is founder of the Citizens and Technology Lab (formerly CivilServant), a public-interest research group at Cornell that organizes citizen behavioral science and behavioral consumer protection research for digital life. CAT Lab has worked with communities of tens of millions of people on reddit, Wikipedia, and Twitter to test ideas for preventing harassment, broadening gender diversity on social media, responding to human/algorithmic misinformation, managing political conflict, and auditing social technologies. Nathan is also pioneering industry-independent evaluations on the impact of tech platform policies in society.

From 2017-2019, Nathan was an associate research scholar at Princeton University in Psychology, the Center for Information Technology, and Sociology. In 2017, Nathan completed his Ph.D. at the MIT Media Lab with Ethan Zuckerman on the governance of human and machine behavior in an experimenting society (video) (thesis). Nathan also spent several years as a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Before MIT, Nathan worked in tech startups that have reached hundreds of millions of phones, helped start a series of education and journalistic charities, and studied English/postcolonial literature at the University of Cambridge and Elizabethtown College. His writings have appeared in The Atlantic, PBS, the Guardian, and other international media.

Nathan’s work is regularly covered by international media, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, NPR All Things Considered, WIRED, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Boston Globe, Canadian Broadcasting Company, FastCompany, Fortune, Chronicle of Higher Education, Nieman Journalism Review, and the Columbia Journalism Review, to name a few.

When not doing research, teaching, and organizing, Nathan enjoys cycling, sailing, facilitating gatherings for creative learning, having conversations about technology and faith, and working on projects that make you laugh, then think.
 

David Mimno is a professor and chair of the Department of Information Science. He holds a Ph.D. from UMass Amherst and was previously the head programmer at the Perseus Project at Tufts and a researcher at Princeton University. His work has been supported by the Sloan foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Science Foundation.

Mor Naaman is Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs and the Don and Mibs Follett professor of information science at Cornell Tech, the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, and the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.

Rajalakshmi Nandakumar is an Assistant Professor at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and in the Information Science department at Cornell University. She received her Ph.D. from University of Washington in Computer Science and Engineering in 2019. Her research focuses on developing wireless sensing technologies that enable novel applications in various domains including mobile health, user interfaces and IoT networks. She developed the first contactless smartphone-based sleep apnea diagnosis system that was licensed by ResMed Inc. and now used by millions of users for sleep staging. She was recognized with the UW Medicine Judy Su Clinical Research award, Paul Baran Young Scholar award by the Marconi Society and also named as the rising star in EECS by MIT.

Helen Nissenbaum is the Andrew H. and Ann R. Tisch Professor of information science at Cornell Tech and the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. She is also the director of the Digital Life Initiative, which was launched in 2017 at Cornell Tech to explore societal perspectives surrounding the development and application of digital technology, focusing on ethics, policy, politics, and quality of life.

Tapan Parikh is an associate professor of information science at Cornell Tech and the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. His research includes human-computer interaction and the design and evaluation of information technologies for education, governance, and international development. Parikh’s students have started several tech companies based on his research and teaching.

David Rand is a Professor of Information Science and Marketing and Management Communications at Cornell University.

Mats Rooth is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Cornell and is the Director of the Computational Linguistics lab. Dr. Rooth does research in two areas, computational linguistics and natural language semantics. He has worked extensively on mixed symbolic/probabilistic models of syntax and the lexicon, on contrastive intonation (what is called focus), and on related phenomena such as ellipsis and presupposition. In addition to these, he is currently working on finite state optimality theory and web harvesting of intonational data.

 
 

Thijs Roumen is an assistant professor of information science at Cornell Tech and the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. He also directs the Matter of Tech lab at Cornell Tech. His lab focuses on digital fabrication, a subfield of technical human-computer interaction (HCI). The lab’s goal is to enable personal fabrication, e.g., making digital fabrication relevant to everyone, as opposed to industrialists and hobbyists currently using fabrication machines. Besides fabrication, the lab is interested in accessibility, primarily focusing on speech accessibility.

Fred B. Schneider is the Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. He joined Cornell's faculty in Fall 1978 and served as department chair from 2014-2018. His Ph.D. (1978) is from Stony Brook University, having completed a B.S. in engineering at Cornell in 1975.

Phoebe Sengers is a professor in the Departments of Information Science and Science & Technology Studies (STS), a graduate field member in computer science, associate faculty with the Department of Art, and a member of the Cornell Initiative for Digital Agriculture. Her primary research fields are human-computer interaction and science & technology studies. Her work integrates ethnographic and historical analysis of the social implications of technology with design methods to suggest alternative future possibilities. At Cornell, she leads the Culturally Embedded Computing research group, which explores rural, working-class and global South experiences of technologies, traces the emerging entanglements between people and data, and uses design to speculate about alternative pasts and futures.

Benjamin Shestakofsky is a sociologist and assistant professor in the Department of Information Science at Cornell University. His research centers on the relationship between work, technology, organizations, and political economy in the age of AI. Shestakofsky's book, Behind the Startup: How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality (University of California Press), investigates the role of financiers in shaping our technological future. Benjamin's academic articles have been published in journals including Socio-Economic Review, Theory and Society, Big Data & Society, Work and Occupations, Socius, International Journal of Communication, and Teaching Sociology. 

David Shmoys obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1984, and held postdoctoral positions at MSRI in Berkeley and Harvard University, and a faculty position at MIT before joining the Cornell faculty. He is Co-Chair of the Academic Planning Committee for Cornell Tech and Associate Director of the Institute of Computational Sustainability at Cornell University.

He is a Fellow of the ACM, INFORMS, and of SIAM, was an NSF Presidential Young Investigator, and has served on numerous editorial boards, including Mathematics of Operations Research (for which he is currently an Associate Editor), Operations Research, ORSA Journal on Computing, Mathematical Programming, and the SIAM Journals of both Computing and Discrete Mathematics, where for the latter he also served as Editor-in-Chief. He has been the advisor for 21 graduated Ph.D. students, and his former students are currently on the faculties of many leading universities and research labs, including MIT, Waterloo, Brown, Maryland, Georgetown, and D-Wave.

Shmoys' research has focused on the design and analysis of efficient algorithms for discrete optimization problems, with applications including scheduling, inventory theory, computational biology, and most recently, comptuational sustainability. His work has highlighted the central role that linear programming plays in the design of approximation algorithms for NP-hard problems; his recent book, co-authored with David Williamson), The Design of Approximation Algorithms, was awarded the 2013 Lanchester Prize by INFORMS.
 

Slayton's research and teaching examine the relationships between and among risk, governance, and expertise, with a focus on international security and cooperation since World War II. Her first book, Arguments that Count: Physics, Computing, and Missile Defense, 1949-2012 (MIT Press, 2013), shows how the rise of a new field of expertise in computing reshaped public policies and perceptions about the risks of missile defense in the United States. In 2015, Arguments that Count won the Computer History Museum Prize.

Slayton's second book project, Shadowing Cybersecurity, examines the emergence of cybersecurity expertise through the interplay of innovation and repair. Slayton is also working on a third project which examines tensions intrinsic to the creation of a “smartâ  electrical power grid—i.e. a more sustainable, reliable, and secure grid. Both of these current projects are supported by a five-year National Science Foundation CAREER award, “Enacting Cybersecurity Expertise.â€Slayton is also a project lead on research funded by a Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence, the Critical Infrastructure Resilience Institute.
 

Benjamin Soltoff is an associate teaching professor in information science. He teaches courses on data science, machine learning, research design, and data communication, and enjoys working with individuals from all backgrounds interested in applying computational methods to extract knowledge and inferences from a wide range of domains.