CITP Emerging Scholar Mentors

Several faculty members have expressed interest in potentially working with Emerging Scholars. Admitted scholars will be matched to projects that mentors are working on based on alignment of interests.

If you have any questions, please contact . Due to the volume of inquires, please direct questions to the CITP email rather than contacting individual faculty mentors directly.

Ruha Benjamin is a professor of African American studies. Her work investigates the social dimensions of science, technology, and medicine, with a focus on the tension between innovation and inequity. Ruha is the author of People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (Stanford University Press), and is at work on three new projects—Race After Technology (Polity), a book about machine bias, discriminatory design, and liberatory approaches to technoscience; an edited volume, Captivating Technology (Duke University Press), which examines how carceral logics shape social life well beyond prisons and police; and finally, The Emperor’s New Genes, a project that explores how population genomics reflects and redraws socio-political classifications such as race, caste, and citizenship. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, Institute for Advanced Study and most recently the 2017 President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton

Tithi Chattopadhyay is executive director of CITP. She works on strategic planning and execution of CITP’s scholarly activities and programs, supports fundraising initiatives, and oversees all operations including staffing, budgets and outreach. Her research and policy interests include studying the digital economy with a focus on the impact of governance on digital access, adoption and use. In past roles, she led the State of Wisconsin’s Broadband office and worked on technology & economic development projects with cities, states and higher education institutions. She holds a Ph.D. in information studies and has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics and mathematics.

Andrés Monroy-Hernández is an assistant professor of computer science and works on human-computer interaction and social computing. Along with his team, he designs and studies technologies that help millions of people connect and collaborate in new ways. He led the creation of the Scratch online community at MIT, the crowd-powered Cortana scheduling assistant at Microsoft, and several social AR and wearable experiences at Snap Inc. At Princeton, he directs the Human-computer Interaction Lab, focusing on public-interest technology development.

His research has received best paper awards at CHI, CSCW, HCOMP, and ICWSM, and has been featured in The New York Times, CNN, Wired, BBC, and The Economist. He was the technical program co-chair for the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Work and Social Computing (CSCW ’18) and the ACM Conference on Collective Intelligence (CI ’19). He was named one of the most influential Latinos in Tech by CNET and one of the MIT Technology Review’s 35-under-35 Innovators for his research on citizens’ use of social media to circumvent drug cartel violence and censorship.

Andrés was on the leadership team of the Future Social Experiences Lab at Microsoft Research and founded the HCI research team at Snap Inc. He holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab and a bachelor’s degree in electronics engineering from Tec de Monterrey in México.

Mihir Kshirsagar runs CITP’s first-of-its-kind interdisciplinary technology policy clinic that gives students and scholars an opportunity to engage directly in the policy process. Most recently, he served in the New York Attorney General’s Bureau of Internet & Technology as the lead trial counsel in cutting edge matters concerning consumer protection law and technology and obtained one of the largest consumer payouts in the State’s history. Previously, he worked for Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP and Cahill Gordon Reindel LLP in New York City on a variety of antitrust, securities and commercial disputes involving emerging and traditional industries. Before law school he was a policy analyst at the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C., educating policy makers about the civil liberties implications of new surveillance technologies. Mihir attended Deep Springs College and received an A.B. from Harvard College in 2000 and a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 2006

Surya Mattu is an award-winning Brooklyn based data journalist, artist and engineer. He builds digital witness tools to investigate algorithmic systems and the ways in which they perpetuate biases and inequalities in society. Mattu leads the Digital Witness Lab at CITP, where he oversees the WhatsApp Watch project.

At the investigative journalism site, The Markup, he created Blacklight, a real-time website privacy inspector, and led Citizen Browser, a first of its kind independent audit of Facebook’s recommendation algorithms. Mattu’s work at The Markup has received public recognition, including two Edward R. Murrow awards and an award from the National Association of Black Journalists. He is also a 2021 University of Michigan Knight Wallace fellow.

Previously, he was a contributing researcher at ProPublica, where he worked on Machine Bias, a series that aims to highlight how algorithmic systems can be biased and discriminate against people. Machine Bias was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Explanatory Journalism. His work has been exhibited at Somerset House, The Haus der Kulturen der Welt , The Whitney Museum, V&A Museum and Bitforms Gallery.

Jonathan Mayer is an assistant professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University. Before joining the Princeton faculty, Jonathan served as the technology law and policy advisor to United States Senator Kamala Harris and as the chief technologist of the Federal Communications Commission Enforcement Bureau. Jonathan’s research centers on the intersection of technology and law, with emphasis on national security, criminal procedure, and consumer privacy. Jonathan is both a computer scientist and a lawyer, and he holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University and a J.D. from Stanford Law School.

Arvind Narayanan is an associate professor of computer science at Princeton. He leads the Princeton Web Transparency and Accountability Project to uncover how companies collect and use our personal information. Narayanan co-created a Massive Open Online Course and textbook on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency technologies which has been used in over 150 courses worldwide. His recent work has shown how machine learning reflects cultural stereotypes, and his doctoral research showed the fundamental limits of de-identification. Narayanan is a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), twice recipient of the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Award, and thrice recipient of the Privacy Papers for Policy Makers Award.

Olga Russakovsky is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University. Her research is in computer vision, closely integrated with machine learning and human-computer interaction. She completed her Ph.D. at Stanford University and her postdoctoral fellowship at Carnegie Mellon University. She has served as a senior program committee member for WACV’16, CVPR’18 and CVPR’19, has organized 8 workshops and tutorials on large-scale recognition, and has given more than 50 invited talks at universities, companies, workshops and conferences. She was awarded the PAMI Everingham Prize in 2016 as one of the leaders of the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge, the MIT Technology Review’s 35-under-35 Innovator award in 2017 and was named one of Foreign Policy Magazine’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers in 2015. In addition to her research, she co-founded and continues to serve on the Board of Directors of the AI4ALL foundation dedicated to increasing diversity and inclusion in AI. She co-founded the Stanford AI4ALL camp teaching AI for social good to high school girls (formerly “SAILORS”) and the Princeton AI4ALL camp teaching AI technology and policy to underrepresented minority high school students.

Matt Salganik is a professor of sociology who has pioneered uses of data and digital technologies in social research. He was appointed interim director of Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy on July 1, 2019, and then director of CITP for a two-year term beginning July 1, 2020.

Matt is affiliated with several other Princeton’s interdisciplinary research centers, including: the Office for Population Research,  the Center for Health and Wellbeing, and the Center for Statistics and Machine Learning. His research interests include social networks and computational social science. He is the author of Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age.

Salganik’s research has been published in journals such as Science, PNAS, Sociological Methodology, and Journal of the American Statistical Association. His papers have won the Outstanding Article Award from the Mathematical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association and the Outstanding Statistical Application Award from the American Statistical Association. Popular accounts of his work have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist, and New Yorker. Salganik is currently on the Board of Directors of Mathematica Policy Research. Salganik’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Joint United Nations Program for HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), Russell Sage Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Facebook, and Google. During sabbaticals from Princeton, he has been a Visiting Professor at Cornell Tech and a Senior Research at Microsoft Research. During the 2018-19 academic year, he was a professor in residence at the New York Times.

Brandon Stewart is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and is also affiliated with the Department of Politics and the Office of Population Research. He develops new quantitative statistical methods for applications across the social sciences. Methodologically his focus is in tools which facilitate automated text analysis and model complex heterogeneity in regression. Many recent applications of these methods have centered on using large corpora of text to better understand propaganda in contemporary China. His research has been published in journals such as American Journal of Political Science, Political Analysis and the Proceedings of the Association of Computational Linguistics. His work has won the Edward R Chase Dissertation Prize, the Gosnell Prize for Excellence in Political Methodology, and the Political Analysis Editor’s Choice Award.