Directory
Farnaz Tehranchi
- Assistant Professor
- CSRAI Affiliate
Department/Unit: College of Engineering
Email: fjt5064@psu.edu
Research Interests: AI, Cognitive modeling, VR, HCI
Ted Toadvine
- Professor
- CSRAI Steering Committee
Department/Unit: College of the Liberal Arts
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
- Co-Director of the Center for Language Science and Professor of Psychology and Linguistics
- CSRAI Affiliate
Department/Unit: College of the Liberal Arts
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 of Law, Policy, and Engineering and Anthropology
- CSRAI Affiliate
Department/Unit: College of Engineering
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
- Distinguished Professor
- CSRAI Affiliate
Department/Unit: College of Information Sciences and Technology
Email: jwang@ist.psu.edu
Research Interests: Affective ComputingBiomedical Imaging InformaticsComputer-based Analysis of Visual ArtMachine LearningComputer Vision
Qian Wang
- Professor
- CSRAI Affiliate
Department/Unit: College of Engineering
Email: quw6@psu.edu
Research Interests: machine learning, advanced manufacturing, type 1 diabetes, modeling of dynamic systems, control systems
Suhang Wang
- Associate Professor
- CSRAI Affiliate
Department/Unit: College of 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.
Krista Wilkinson
- Distinguished Professor in Communication Sciences and Disorders
- CSRAI Affiliate
Department/Unit: College of Health and Human Development
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.