Faculty

I am a Research and Data Scientist in the D-Lab at UC Berkeley. My research focuses on the societal impacts of machine learning models, with an emphasis on understanding the norms and values elicited from large language models. I also lead and support a range of social science projects, spanning hate speech detection, education, and computational humanities. Lastly, I help provide D-Lab's core instructional and consulting services.

I previously obtained my PhD in the Physics Department at UC Berkeley, conducting research in the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience under Kristofer...

I am a sociophonetician, specifically interested in how people use linguistic variation to perform and construct their social identities and to understand the identities of others through differences in their use of properties related to intonation and voice quality. More recently, I’ve been focused on sociolinguistic and phonetic challenges for speech technology, especially as they relate to the nature of variation and social inequality. I also work on political speech and identity, with a special focus on political figures.

My ongoing research aims to address how speakers and listeners make...

Carolyn Chen, a sociologist, is Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. The daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, she grew up in Pennsylvania and Southern California. Carolyn received her A.B. from Brown University, and her Ph.D. in Sociology from UC Berkeley. She previously taught at Northwestern University in the Department of Sociology, as well as in the Program in Asian American Studies, where she served as Director.

Carolyn’s research focuses on religion, spirituality, and work in the new economy, as well as Asian American religions. She is the author of Getting...

Marion Fourcade is Natalie Cohen Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley. She is the author of Economists and Societies: Discipline and Profession in the United States, Britain and France, 1890s to 1990s (Princeton University Press, 2009), The Ordinal Society (with Kieran Healy, Harvard University Press 2024), and numerous articles on economic knowledge, valuation, and politics in comparative perspective. Her new project examines the political economy of truth in the age of AI. She is a recipient of the American Sociological Association's Distinguished Book Award, the Society for the Social...

Cori Hayden is the Robert H. Lowie Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Social Science Matrix. Her research and teaching focus on the anthropology of science, technology, and medicine. She received her PhD in Anthropology from UC Santa Cruz in 2000 and has held fellowships at the Center for US-Mexican Studies in San Diego, the University of Cambridge, and the Center for Advanced Studies in the Social and Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) in Palo Alto. At Berkeley, she has served as the Chair of the Department of Anthropology and as the Director of the Center for Science, Technology...

I am a historian of the human dimensions of modern science and technology, and my work looks at three interrelated questions. How do we scaffold our world with abstraction, quantification, prediction, and optimization? How are these drives shaped by, and shape, our society, culture, politics, and institutions? And how do we deal with what happens, individually and institutionally, past and present, when abstraction falls short and our lives burble over the edge of this disciplinary frame?

I was originally trained as a historian of 20th-century physics, and my work has increasingly shifted to...

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of German at the University of California, Berkeley. My work brings together German intellectual history, literary theory, and media studies, with a current emphasis on how large language models and generative AI are reshaping the conditions of writing, interpretation, and textual culture. I am especially interested in the ways computational systems produce new expectations of style, voice, and meaning—and in what these shifts reveal about older philosophical debates on language and the human, from Hans Blumenberg to twentieth-century philosophical...

Dr. Claudia Natalia von Vacano is the Founding Executive Director and Senior Research Associate of UC Berkeley’s Social Sciences Data Laboratory (D-Lab), including the Berkeley Federal Statistical Research Data Center. Her work advances interdisciplinary approaches to computational research, data science education, digital humanities, and trustworthy AI.

At D-Lab, Dr. von Vacano leads programs that support computational and data-intensive research through training, consultations, working groups, courses, and cross-campus collaboration. She partners with the College of Computing, Data Science...

Genevieve Smith is a social scientist examining how values, power, and economic incentives shape AI systems, the ensuing social impacts, and pathways toward more equitable technological futures. Her research sits at the intersection of political economy, feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS), and development studies. Her research agenda centers on two interconnected prongs that examine: (1) how power, values, and economic incentives shape AI systems and whom they serve, including evaluating system outputs where possible; and (2) how AI might be built and governed differently. Across...

Anushah Hossain is a historian of technology and Research Director of the Script Encoding Initiative (SEI) in the Department of Linguistics at UC Berkeley.

SEI has been central to bringing more than two-thirds of the scripts now in the Unicode Standard (the infrastructure that lets computers represent written language) into digital use. Her work sits on both sides of that standard. As a participant, she evaluates and funds proposals for new scripts and mediates among standards-makers, user communities, and linguistic experts. As a scholar, she asks what follows from handling the world's...