AMA Research Team

Claudia von Vacano, Ph.D.

Founding Executive Director, P.I., Research Director, FSRDC

Dr. Claudia von Vacano is the Founding Executive Director and Senior Research Associate of D-Lab and Digital Humanities at Berkeley and is on the boards of the Social Science Matrix and Berkeley Center for New Media. She has worked in policy and educational administration since 2000, and at the UC Office of the President and UC Berkeley since 2008. She received a Master’s degree from Stanford University in Learning, Design, and Technology. Her doctorate is in Policy, Organizations, Measurement, and Evaluation from UC Berkeley. Her expertise is in organizational theory and...

Chris Kennedy, Ph.D.

Research Fellow
Harvard Medical School

Chris Kennedy is a postdoctoral fellow in biomedical informatics at Harvard Medical School, focusing on deep learning and causal inference in Gabriel Brat’s surgical informatics lab. He has a Ph.D. in biostatistics from UC Berkeley where he worked with Alan Hubbard and Mark van der Laan...

Caroline Figueroa, MD, Ph.D.

Research Fellow, Digital Health Social Justice Project Lead
School of Social Welfare
Digital Health Social Justice

Caroline Figueroa, MD Ph.D., is a Postdoctoral Scholar at UC Berkeley School of Social Welfare. She obtained her MD degree and Ph.D. degree at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Her Ph.D. research took place at the University of Amsterdam and at the University of Oxford, where she studied cognitive and neurobiological vulnerability factors for recurrence of depression in patients remitted from Major Depressive Disorder. Current research interest is on digital interventions for depression, with an emphasis on developing cutting-edge innovations that tailor to the needs of...

Erin Manalo-Pedro

Research Fellow
Community Health Sciences (UCLA)

Erin Manalo-Pedro is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health with a minor in education. She focuses her racial health equity research on curriculum, the health workforce, and political interventions for communities of color. Drawing from Public Health Critical Race Praxis and Pinayism, she aims to use methods, like natural language processing and counter storytelling, to document the subtleties of structural racism and resistance from marginalized groups.

To guide her interdisciplinary approach, Erin leverages
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Sajia Darwish

Researcher
Public Health

Sajia Darwish is a masters student at the School of Public Health. Her research interests center on using empirical methods to understand and solve problems in health and education. Sajia holds a B.A. from Mount Holyoke College and a M.A. from Stanford University.

Swetha Pola

Research Fellow
School of Information

Swetha (she/her) is a 5th Year Master of Information and Data Science student at the School of Information, with experience in Cognitive Science, Psychology research, and product management. Her research interests include building ethical, transparent AI and the impacts of technologies (specifically, mass media, surveillance, and algorithms of bias) on longitudinal behavioral health. She is happy to help with questions on Python, R, SQL, machine learning, neural networks, statistical analysis, and research design!

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