The University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public has named five new faculty members, Benjamin Mako Hill (Communication), Carole Lee (Philosophy), Martin Saveski (iSchool), Yanfang Su (Global Health) and Bo Zhao (Geography), bolstering the CIP’s multidisciplinary research and expertise.
Appointed for two-year terms with eligibility to renew their affiliations, CIP affiliated faculty members will have the opportunity to engage with the center’s full range of research and activities, including pursuing collaborative research proposals and projects, participating in the CIP’s Invited Speaker Series, utilizing the center’s research infrastructure, and applying for the CIP Innovation Fund.
Carole Lee
Professor
UW Department of Philosophy
Dr. Lee studies emerging norms and disparities in how scientific institutions award and set standards for markers of credibility such as successful peer review outcomes. Her research has been published across fields (e.g., Science, The Lancet, Philosophy of Science) and supported by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and a Career Enhancement Fellowship funded by the Mellon Foundation and administered by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars.
Martin Saveski
Assistant Professor
UW Information School
Dr. Saveski’s research develops tools for analyzing large-scale social data, aiming to provide a better understanding of social structure and behaviors online while also impacting the design of digital social systems. His recent work has focused on reducing political polarization online, improving the quality of online conversations, and causal inference in social systems. His research often falls at the intersections of Social Networks, Machine Learning, and Causal Inference. His work typically appears in venues such as ICWSM, WWW, and KDD, and has included collaborations with researchers at Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. His research has been awarded a best paper honorable mention at WWW ’18 and has been featured in popular media outlets, including The New York Times, NPR, and MIT Tech Review.
Yanfang Su
Assistant Professor
UW Department of Global Health
Dr. Su, an Assistant Professor of Global Health in the School of Public Health and an Adjunct faculty at Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at University of Washington, is a health economist with more than 10 years of work experience in health systems and policy. Dr. Su holds a Doctor of Science in Global Health and Population within Health Systems track from Harvard University. During her postdoctoral training at the University of Washington, Dr. Su applied econometric methods to health financing and published papers in The Lancet as co-first author and The Lancet Infectious Diseases as first author. Her publications focus on three areas: 1) economic evaluation of healthcare systems, including analysis of equity, supply, demand, costs, and quality; 2) public policy evaluation; and 3) global health and population measures.
Bo Zhao
Associate Professor
UW Department of Geography
Dr. Zhao studies the social implications and ethical aspects of emerging geospatial technologies. His recent projects leverage these technologies to advance social inclusion and justice, especially for vulnerable groups such as refugees impacted by climate change, LGBTQ+ communities in challenging environments, and Black communities disproportionately affected by COVID-19. A significant part of his work involves exploring the use and consequences of geospatial misinformation in critical social and political issues. This includes his analysis of social media misinformation in supporting territorial disputes of Indigenous tribes and in discussions around “fake news” via “location-spoofing.” Currently, Dr. Zhao’s research in “Deepfake Geography” encourages scholars to develop advanced strategies to effectively tackle the intricate societal challenges arising from geographical misinformation generated by Geographic Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI) in today’s “post-truth” era.
Benjamin Mako Hill
Associate Professor
UW Department of Communication
Dr. Hill is a social scientist and technologist. In both roles, he works to understand the social dynamics that shape online communities. His work focuses on communities engaged in the peer production of digital public goods — like Wikipedia and Linux. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington and a founding member of the Community Data Science Collective. He is also an Adjunct Associate Professor in UW’s Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering, Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, and Information School. He is also a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and an affiliate at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science — both at Harvard University. He has also been an activist, developer, contributor, and leader in the free and open source software and free culture movements for more than two decades as part of the Debian, Ubuntu, and Wikimedia projects. He is the author of several best-selling technical books and has served terms as a member of the Free Software Foundation board of directors and an advisor to the Wikimedia Foundation. Hill’s CIP faculty appointment will begin June 15.
