The University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public is welcoming five new doctoral students — four from the UW Information School (iSchool) and one from the UW Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) — who will be pursuing CIP-affiliated research and other work in the new academic year.
- Kayla Duskin, an iSchool PhD student, has worked at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory as a data scientist and machine learning researcher studying computer vision, natural language processing and social media analytics. Duskin graduated from Western Washington University in 2016 with a B.S. in applied mathematics and Spanish.
- Sydney DeMets, an iSchool PhD student, has been a post-baccalaureate student in the Intelligence and Space Research division at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where she’s used satellite imagery to forecast political instability and disease outbreaks. She graduated in 2019 from Lawrence University in Wisconsin where she double majored in government and biology.
- Isabella (Izzi) Grasso, an iSchool PhD student, graduated in 2021 from Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York with a B.S. in data science, was recently awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. While at Clarkson, Grasso conducted research with computer science professor Jeanna Matthews auditing criminal justice software, quantifying gender bias using machine learning and exploring algorithmic accountability. Learn more about Grasso’s work.
- Zarine Kharazian, a HCDE PhD student researching influence operations, online harms and cross-platform information flows using mixed methods, previously worked as an associate editor at The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab. Kharazian graduated from the College of William and Mary in 2017 with a B.A. in Government and French/Francophone studies.
- Stephen Prochaska, an iSchool PhD student, graduated from the iSchool’s MSIM program in 2021, worked as an iAffiliates graduate assistant, and in previous work at the Center for an Informed Public, helped develop a quiz focused on spotting deepfake photo and video images and facilitated Factcheck Ambassador trainings as part of a CIP collaboration with AARP Washington state. Prochaska, who received an iSchool 2021 Capstone Research Award for tracking users across Parler and Twitter, graduated in 2013 from Beloit College with a B.A. in psychology.
