Workshop Instructors

Joe Brightbill is the technology lead for Custom Data projects in the Scientific and Academic Research division of Clarivate Analytics. He has been with the company for seven years, working in detail with bibliometric data from the Web of Science, InCites, Essential Science Indicators, and Journal Citation Reports. He graduated from Drexel University in 2012 with a BS in computer science.

Pietro Cipresso is the senior researcher and Chief Technical Officer at the Applied Technology for Neuro-Psychology Laboratory - ATN-P Lab, Istituto Auxologico Italiano, Milan, Italy, and Assistant Professor in Psychometrics at Catholic University of Milan. Cipresso, who is also Project Manager inside the ATN-P Lab for the Positive Technology area, has coordinated and coinvestigated several National, European and International Projects and has been Visiting Researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, USA, and at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. He is the team leader of a forthcoming (2018) EU Project (BodyPass: API-ecosystem for cross-sectorial exchange of 3D personal data).

Alina von Davier is the Vice President of ACTNext by ACT, Inc., a Research, Development, and Business Innovation Division, as well as an Adjunct Professor at Fordham University. She earned her PhD in mathematics from the Otto von Guericke University of Magdeburg, Germany, and her MS in mathematics from the University of Bucharest, Romania. At ACT, von Davier and her team of experts are responsible for developing prototypes of research-based solutions and creating a research agenda to support the next generation for learning and assessment systems (LAS). She pioneers the development and application of computational psychometrics and conducts research on blending machine learning algorithms with the psychometric theory. Prior to her employment with ACT, von Davier was a Senior Research Director at Educational Testing Service (ETS) where she led the Computational Psychometrics Research Center.

Steven Franconeri is a Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University and Director of the Northwestern Cognitive Science Program. His research is on visual thinking, visual communication, and the psychology of data visualization. He directs the Visual Thinking Laboratory, where a team of researchers explore the power and limits of your visual system, and how better design and pedagogy can help students and scientists understand and use visual representations across paper, screens, and their imagination.

Roger Guimerà graduated in Physics at Universitat de Barcelona in 1998, and obtained a PhD in Chemical Engineering from Universitat Rovira i Virgili in 2003. He then moved to Northwestern University, where he worked as a postdoctoral fellow and, later, as a Fulbright Scholar. In 2008 he became a Research Assistant Professor at Northwestern's department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, before accepting his current position at ICREA. Roger's research is devoted to the study of complex systems and, particularly, of the structure of complex networks and the interplay between network structure and dynamics.

Bryan Head is a PhD candidate at the Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling (CCL). His research focuses on the design and analysis of multi-level agent-based models. His work focuses on combining machine learning with agent-based modeling, and applies cutting edge techniques to both the design and the analysis of agent-based models.

Arthur Hjorth is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling (CCL), and at the Center for Prevention and Implementation Methodology (CePIM) at Northwestern University. In his work at the CCL, Arthur works on the use of ABMs as teaching tools, specifically for helping learners think about social issues as complex systems. In his work at CePIM, Arthur builds research models for HIV prevention at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University. He received his PhD in Learning Sciences at Northwestern University.

Christina provides data science support and training to researchers, especially those in the social sciences, as a part of Northwestern IT’s Research Computing Services team. After leading and advising on quantitative and computationally intensive social science research projects for over a decade, she now enjoys helping researchers overcome computational and technical obstacles in their research. She believes web applications, databases, and regular expressions can change researchers' lives, and still feels like a wizard when a computer actually does what she tells it to. While she uses a wide variety of programming languages and tools in her work, R is a favorite; she is the founder of the Northwestern R User Group. Christina has a PhD in Political Science and a MS in Statistics from Stanford University.