Bethany Hsiao is a third-year PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania in the Wharton Operations, Information, & Decisions department. She is part of the Computational Social Science Lab and advised by Professor Duncan Watts. Her research focuses on AI and its impact on human decision-making.

Meetali Jain serves as TJLP’s founding executive director. Over the course of her career, Meetali has worked as a lawyer, policy advocate, campaigner and educator. She started her career by representing detainees post-9/11 accused of terrorism, including at Guantanamo Bay, and by organizing in South Asian and Muslim communities impacted by surveillance and racial profiling. She’s also litigated cases involving human rights, immigrant justice, and challenging corporate power. Meetali worked at the Morrison & Foerster and Goldstein Demchak law firms, taught human rights and constitutional law in law clinics at American University, Seton Hall, and in law schools across South Africa. In 2017, while working as Campaign and Legal Director at Avaaz, Meetali began working on issues of disinformation and broader tech harms globally. In 2021, she joined Reset Tech where she focused primarily on issues of tech law and policy in the US. Meetali clerked for the Honorable Virginia Phillips in the U.S. Central District of California and for Justice Yvonne Mokgoro in the Constitutional Court of South Africa. She serves on the Boards of the Integrity Institute, Type Media Center, and is an advisor to the California Initiative for Technology and Democracy (CITED), and Design It For Us (DIFU) and ReThink Citizens Youth Squad Advisory Coalition, both youth-led movements to build better tech spaces for young people.

Min Kyung Lee is an assistant professor in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin and the director of the Human-AI Interaction lab. Dr. Lee has conducted some of the first studies that empirically examine the social implications of algorithms’ emerging roles in management and governance in society. She has extensive expertise in developing theories, methods, and tools for human-centered AI and deploying them in practice through collaboration with real-world stakeholders and organizations.

Yuning Liu is a PhD candidate at Harvard University whose research focuses on digital well-being in social media and AI use. Her work examines how users pursue goals and exercise agency in digital environments, with an emphasis on aligning platform design with user intentions. Through both observational and experimental studies, she analyzes longitudinal data on user behaviors, platform features, and online traces. She also collaborates with social media content creators to enhance the quality of online health communication.

Pat Pataranutaporn, Ph.D. is an assistant professor, technologist, and researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he is the founding director of the Cyborg Psychology research group. He also serves as co-director of the MIT Media Lab Advancing Humans with AI (AHA) Research Program. His research lies at the intersection of AI and human-computer interaction, where he focuses on inventing, investigating, and inspiring next-generation human-AI systems for human flourishing. As founding director of the Cyborg Psychology research group at the MIT Media Lab, he leads a team of interdisciplinary researchers to develop personalized AI systems informed by human psychology and behavioral science, augmenting human capabilities in decision-making, critical thinking, and learning. His group investigates emerging phenomena through empirical studies examining how AI reshapes cognition, emotion, and behavior, from emotional dependence on AI companions and cognitive manipulation to false memory implantation, placebo effects of human-AI interaction, and the co-evolution of human and machine intelligence. Through collaborations with humanists, artists, and filmmakers, Pataranutaporn and his team create speculative artifacts and experiences that inspire critically optimistic futures, envisioning radically pluralistic cyborg cultures that offer nuanced alternatives to dystopian and utopian extremes while honoring diverse cultural values and ways of knowing. Pataranutaporn’s research contributions have been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals and conferences, such as Nature Machine Intelligence, IEEE, ACM SIGCHI, ACM SIGGRAPH, ACM ISWC, and ACM Augmented Humans. His work has been highlighted by the United Nations AI for Good forum, and has been featuredin MIT Tech Review, the Guardian, New York Times, Washington Post, Forbes, the Atlantic, Scientific American, Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, and more. Pataranutaporn’s work has also been honored as one of TIME’s “Best Inventions of 2023” and was included in Fast Company’s “2023 World Changing Ideas.” Pataranutaporn has been awarded fellowships and grants by multiple research agencies and corporations, including NASA, OpenAI, and KBTG. He has also collaborated with researchers from both academia and industry, including researchers from Stanford Medicine, Harvard, Mass General Brigham, UCSB, UCLA, UC Irvine, Microsoft Research, OpenAI, NTT Data, and more. Pat’s projects have been exhibited at the MIT Museum (Massachusetts), Asia Pacific Triennial (Queensland Art Gallery, Australia), The Art Gallery of Western Australia (Australia) MAXXI – National Museum of 21st Century Art (Italy), Bangkok Art Biennale (Thailand), Bangkok City Gallery (Thailand), National Museum of Singapore (Singapore), Essex Peabody Museum (USA), London Design Festival (UK), Transmediale Festival (Germany), National Taiwan Science Education Center (Taiwan), IDEA Museum (Arizona), Mesa Arts Center (Arizona), Autodesk Gallery (California), SIGGRAPH Asia (Tokyo), Ars Electronica (Virtual) and more. Pataranutaporn co-designed and taught one of the first MIT courses on “Generative AI,” developed to provide students with the essential knowledge and skills required to navigate the frontiers of this emerging field and he co-organized the first workshop on virtual AI humans, attended by over 1600 remotely and over 200 in person in 2021. Pat also serve as the co-creator and writer for the Netflix sci-fi anthology series “Tomorrow and i” premiered in 2024.

Steve Rathje is an incoming assistant professor of human-computer interaction in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and is currently completing a postdoctoral fellowship in Psychology at New York University. His research focuses on how digital technologies, such as social media and AI, shape psychological phenomena such as polarization and well-being. He was included on the 2025 Forbes 30 Under 30 list and was named a Rising Star by the American Psychological Association. Steve has published 38 papers in academic journals such as Science, Nature, and PNAS and has received more than $2.7 million in grant funding for his research.

Cheryl Strauss Einhorn teaches decision-making at Columbia University and Cornell University and founded Decisive, for teams solving complex problems. Cheryl is an award-winning investigative journalist and author of three books: Problem Solved, Investing In Financial Research, and Problem Solver. Her fourth book on AI and decision-making, The Human Edge: Decision-Making In An AI-Driven World, is scheduled to be published in early 2026. Watch Cheryl’s TED talk and visit areamethod.com.

Shuhua Sun is an Associate Professor of Management and the Callais Professor of Entrepreneurship at Tulane University’s Freeman School of Business, where he also serves as Director of the Goldring Institute for International Business. Dr. Sun’s research examines how individuals and teams navigate social and technological environments to achieve career, creative, and performance goals. His work has been published in leading academic journals, including Organization Science, Journal of Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Personnel Psychology, and Journal of Business Venturing, and has been featured in college textbooks. His recent research focuses on people-centered strategies for deploying and implementing AI in the workplace. Professor Sun has extensive international teaching experience at the undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral levels. At Tulane, he teaches courses in Organizational Behavior and Managing People in Organizations. Prior to joining Tulane, he taught courses such as Advanced Quantitative Research Methods in Business, Business Innovation and Sustainable Development, and Organizational Learning and Development at Maastricht University’s School of Business and Economics in the Netherlands, as well as Management & Organization and Managing Change at the National University of Singapore Business School.

Ertugrul Uysal is a postdoctoral researcher at the Chair of Technology Marketing at ETH Zürich. He has a PhD in Management from the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland, with a background in Cognitive Science. His research focuses on how we interact with and relate to digital technologies (GenAI, social media, virtual reality, voice technologies). He often thinks about how we can achieve a sustainable digital future. More recently, he is interested in the intersection of AI and empathy, working on GenAI-powered voice technologies with emotion recognition capabilities at the AI Empathy Research Initiative.

Jay Van Bavel is a Professor of Psychology & Neural Science at New York University, an affiliate at the Stern School of Business in Management and Organizations, Professor at the Norwegian School of Economics, and Director of the Center for Conflict & Cooperation. He is also co-author of The Power of Us: Harnessing Our Shared Identities to Improve Performance, Increase Cooperation, and Promote Social Harmony (winner of the 2022 APA William James Book Award). Jay completed his PhD at the University of Toronto and a Postdoctoral Fellowship at The Ohio State University. From neurons to social networks, Jay’s research examines how collective concerns—group identities, moral values, and political beliefs—shape the mind, brain, and behavior. His work addresses issues of group identity, social motivation, intergroup conflict & polarization, cooperation, beliefs & misinformation, moral judgment & decision-making, social media, and public health. He studies these issues using a combination of experimental social psychology, behavioral economics, cross-cultural samples, cognitive neuroscience methods, and computational social science. Jay has published over 150 academic papers (including in Science, Nature, PNAS) and he is a Clarivate highly cited researcher (in the top 1% of researchers worldwide). He has written about his research for The New York Times, BBC, The Atlantic, Scientific American, The Wall Street Journal, Guardian, LA Times, TIME, and The Washington Post, wrote a mentoring column for Science Magazine, and he writes one of the most popular social psychology newsletters on Substack called The Power of Us. Jay’s work has been cited in the US Supreme Court and Senate, he has created TEDx and TED-Ed videos, and he has consulted with the White House, United Nations, European Union, and World Health Organization.