SERC Group Leaders

Dr. Lula Chen

Lula Chen is the Research Director at MIT GOV/LAB, where she currently works on projects about trust, technology in government, and democracy and generative AI. Current research projects include studying the impact of integrating generative AI in deliberative platforms on discourse and participant attitudes in the U.S. and studying how different online vs. in-person modes of access to public services can affect individuals’ attitudes about government in Kenya. She has also worked on many policy evaluations in the U.S. and sub-Saharan Africa with partners in government, academia, and NGOs. During her doctoral studies, she served as a Methods Specialist with the Office of Evaluation Sciences at the U.S. General Services Administration, conducted research on taxation and public service delivery in Malawi, and studied group decision-making in U.S. foreign policy. Lula holds a BSFS in Comparative Studies and an MA in Security Studies from Georgetown University. She received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Dr. Walter Gerych

Walter Gerych joined MIT as a postdoctoral associate in 2023 and is hosted by Marzyeh Ghassemi in the Healthy ML group. Before coming to MIT, Walter completed his PhD in Data Science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 2023, where his dissertation focused on mitigating the negative effects of poorly labeled data and biased models. His current research continues to focus on making AI models less biased and more robust. He has a particular interest on debiasing large, pretrained models in practical and non-destructive ways. Beyond debiasing, he is also interested in promoting model robustness through developing calibrated measures of uncertainty in large language models and other AI systems.

Dr. Michal Masny

Michal Masny is a postdoctoral associate in SERC and in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. He received his PhD from Princeton in 2023. His work seeks to connect philosophical theory with issues of wide public concern. His current research interests include: the nature of human and animal well-being, our obligations to future generations, the risk of human extinction, the significance of progress, life extension technology, and the future of work. He is keen to collaborate with academics from other fields on issues related to the ethics of technology.

Dr. Kevin Mills

Kevin Mills joined MIT as a postdoctoral associate in 2021 and began his appointment in SERC in 2023. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow at Northeastern University (2019-2021), and received his PhD from Indiana University Bloomington (2019). His two broad areas of research are metaethics and technology ethics. In metaethics, his research explores the prospects for interdisciplinary work in ethics, especially collaborative ventures between scientists and philosophers. To shed light on this, he looks at the roles empirical knowledge can and cannot play in normative reasoning. In technology ethics, he is particularly interested in how the internet and artificial intelligence are transforming our society, and the many ethical challenges this raises. At MIT, he works primarily on issues surrounding privacy, data collection, misinformation, and online manipulation.

Dr. Karim Nader

Karim Nader is a postdoctoral associate in SERC and in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. His research focuses on the ways in which technology reflects and affects human values. His research has focused on the ethics of virtual actions, arguing that virtual reality and the things we do therein are only fictional, meaning that we only imagine that they are real. Karim has written about the matchmaking algorithm behind dating apps and the biases that emerge from it. He’s interested in the norms of online discourse and the ways we can be responsible epistemic agents on the internet.

Dr. Amir Reisizadeh

Amir Reisizadeh is a post-doctoral associate in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at MIT. His broad research interests include optimization theory, machine learning and algorithmic fairness. In particular, his PhD was focused on the design and analysis of efficient distributed and federated machine learning methods to learn accurate models from decentralized and diverse data. More recently, he has focused on addressing the unfair treatment of machine learning models across demographic groups using optimization and statistical learning tools. Prior to joining MIT, he graduated from UC Santa Barbara in 2021 with a Ph.D. in electrical engineering.

Dr. Michelle Spektor

As a historian of technology, Michelle Spektor studies the past as a source of insight into the social, political, and ethical implications of surveillance technologies in the present. Her research examines why states are increasingly using biometric systems to identify their own citizens, and how these systems shape state-citizen relationships and politics of national belonging. Her current book project pursues these questions by tracing the transnational history of British and Israeli biometric infrastructures since 1904.

Before joining SERC, Michelle was a lecturer in the Science, Technology, and Society Program at Tufts University, and completed a PhD in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. She has previously held fellowships at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, and the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, at Stanford University.

Dr. Nikki Stevens

Nikki Stevens is a critical technology researcher, software engineer, and open-source community organizer. Nikki’s academic research focuses on (1) ways that software engineering upholds systems of social power, and (2) how software developers can engage with theories of social change in their work. Nikki is currently writing their first monograph about the role of software engineering in the contemporary prison abolition movement.

As a software engineer and technical architect, Nikki led the architecture of web properties for billion-dollar corporations like Coca-Cola, Sony, and Instagram, and their work has won numerous awards, including at SXSW. In open source, Nikki’s work in the Drupal community earned them the Aaron Winborn Award and recognitions by Red Hat and The Linux Foundation. They are currently a postdoctoral researcher in MIT’s Data + Feminism Lab (DUSP) and SERC.