Affiliates
Farnaz Tehranchi
- Assistant Professor
- CSRAI Affiliate
Department/Unit: College of Engineering
Email: fjt5064@psu.edu
Research Interests: AI, Cognitive modeling, VR, HCI
Ted Toadvine
- Nancy Tuana Director
- CSRAI Steering Committee
Department/Unit: Rock Ethics Institute
Email: tat30@psu.edu
Research Interests: Toadvine’s research over the last two decades has focused on the themes of aesthetics, animality, embodiment, environment, intersubjectivity, nature, ontology, philosophical method, and temporality. He draws inspiration from the phenomenological tradition (especially Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas) as well as deconstruction and post-structuralism (especially Derrida, Nancy, and Deleuze). In 2003, he coined the term “ecophenomenology” to designate an approach to environmental theory that draws on the phenomenological tradition while critically reorienting its relationship with ecology and naturalism. Ecophenomenology is now a recognized field of study across the environmental humanities with proponents in ecocriticism, the arts, architecture, and animal studies, as well as philosophy. His research over the last decade develops a post-naturalistic approach to nature inspired by classic and contemporary sources in the continental tradition, including Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger, Scheler, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Derrida, Deleuze, Nancy, and Agamben. His first monograph, Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature (Northwestern, 2009), contributes to the theoretical foundations of this new philosophy of nature by showing that Merleau-Ponty's conception of nature, as it develops across his major theoretical works, provides an alternative to naturalistic and constructivist accounts that dominate current environmental theory. Here Toadvine examines the contributions and limitations of Merleau-Ponty’s early Gestalt ontology, his account of radical reflection as a method for disclosing the anonymous level of sensibility and the immemorial past of nature, the radicalization of phenomenology’s investigations of non-human animals, and the significance of his later ontology for environmental concerns. This study lays the philosophical foundations for Toadvine’s original investigations in the philosophy of nature on topics that include nature’s resistance to reflection, the human-animal relation, the temporality of the elements, and biodiacritics.
Janet van Hell
- Professor of Psychology and Linguistics
- CSRAI Affiliate
Department/Unit: Psychology; Center for Language Science
Email: jgv3@psu.edu
Research Interests: I study the neural and cognitive mechanisms of child and adult bilinguals' language processing, code-switching, accented-speech processing, and creative language use. I serve as PI on the NSF NRT program "Linguistic diversity across the lifespan: Transforming training to advance human-technology interaction", and as Director of the Center for Language Science.
Mihail Velikov
- Assistant Professor of Finance
- CSRAI Affiliate
Department/Unit: Smeal College of Business
Email: velikov@psu.edu
Research Interests: I am interested in working on a paper that would use LLMs coupled with my own code base to automate the production of papers in academic finance.
Alan Wagner
- Assistant Professor
- CSRAI Affiliate
Department/Unit: Department of Aerospace Engineering/Rock Ethics Institute
Email: alan.r.wagner@psu.edu
Research Interests: My interest is in developing robots that are capable of interacting with a broad range of humans within a variety of different social situations. I try to ideas from cognitive science to develop methods for robot reasoning. Application areas in emergency evacuation, construction robotics, and game playing.
Jennifer Wagner
- Assistant Professor of Law, Policy, and Engineering and Anthropology
- CSRAI Affiliate
Department/Unit: School of Engineering Design and Innovation
Email: jkw131@psu.edu
Research Interests: ELSI (ethical, legal, and social implications) of human genetic/omic and digital health technologies
James Wang
- Professor
- CSRAI Affiliate
Department/Unit: College of Information Sciences and Technology
Email: jwang@ist.psu.edu
Research Interests: Affective Computing Biomedical Imaging Informatics Computer-based Analysis of Visual Art Machine Learning Computer Vision
Qian Wang
- Professor of Mechanical Engineering
- CSRAI Affiliate
Department/Unit: Mechanical Engineering/College of Engineering
Email: quw6@psu.edu
Research Interests: machine learning, advanced manufacturing, type 1 diabetes, modeling of dynamic systems, control systems
Suhang Wang
- Assistant Professor
- CSRAI Affiliate
Department/Unit: Information Sciences and Technology
Email: szw494@psu.edu
Research Interests: I mainly work on interpretable, robust and fair machine learning and deep learning models with application to social media mining.
Yael Warshel
- Assistant Professor and Research Associate
- CSRAI Affiliate
Department/Unit: Telecommunications and Media industries, Bellisario College and Rock Ethics Institute, CLA
Email: ywarshel@psu.edu
Research Interests: I work at the intersection between international media, child, and conflict analysis, practice and policy specializing in the concept of “peace communication” I pioneered. My international and global field-based research explores critical and empirical questions concerning the efficacy of peace communication interventions in managing aspects of armed political conflicts; uses of media technologies to aid or empower the demographic majority of conflict zones: children and youth; the human and communication rights of stateless and forcibly-migrated and –sedentarized conflict zones implicated populations, and the comparative determinants of international coverage of conflicts relative to the numbers and magnitudes of conflicts. Keywords: young people, media, conflict zones, conflict management, international, and global
Krista Wilkinson
- Distinguished Professor
- CSRAI Affiliate
Department/Unit: Communication Sciences and Disorders
Email: kmw22@psu.edu
Research Interests: Dr. Wilkinson's scholarship seeks to improve the design of technologies used by individuals with developmental disabilities to support their communication, speech, and language.
Shomir Wilson
- Assistant Professor
- CSRAI Steering Committee
Department/Unit: College of Information Sciences and Technology
Email: suw724@psu.edu
Research Interests: Shomir Wilson's research interests span natural language processing, artificial intelligence, digital privacy, and computational social science. He is particularly interested in breaking down technology's "walls of text", situations where a human user or decisionmaker is expected to consume a large quantity of text to take action while lacking time or expertise to properly understand it. Prior to joining Penn State he held postdoctoral positions in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science and the University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, and his B.S. in Computer Science, B.S. in Mathematics, and B.A. in Philosophy from Virginia Tech.
Alex Winters
- Systems Design Specialist
- CSRAI Affiliate
Department/Unit: Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Research Center
Email: ajw5296@psu.edu
Research Interests: child welfare, policy cost-benefit analysis, and entrepreneurial communities
Christopher Witko
- Professor of Public Policy and Political Science
- CSRAI Affiliate
Department/Unit: College of the Liberal Arts
Email: cxw877@psu.edu
Research Interests: I am broadly interested in how public policy both shapes and responds to economic change such as growing inequality, financialization and technological innovation. I used experimental and traditional observational approaches as well as big data in my research.
Dinghao Wu
- Professor
- CSRAI Affiliate
Department/Unit: Information Sciences and Technology
Email: duw12@psu.edu
Research Interests: Cybersecurity, machine learning, software engineering.