Michael Hammer Society of Fellows

Weizi Li

Postdoctoral Hammer Fellow
Weizi Li earned his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and M.S. from George Mason University, both in Computer Science. He was also a visiting student at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a research intern at Disney Research, Lenovo Research and Technology, and the National University of Singapore. His current research interests include Multi-agent Simulation, Intelligent Transportation Systems, Robotics, and Machine Learning. His long-term research goal is to develop theory and practice in facilitating collaborative relationships between humans and autonomous systems.

Weizi’s website

Janelle Schlossberger

Postdoctoral Hammer Fellow
Janelle Schlossberger received her PhD in Business Economics from Harvard Business School and Harvard University, and she received her AB in Physics and Mathematics from Harvard University.  She is the recipient of the 2019 Aliprantis Prize from the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET).  Her research is at the intersection of economic theory, networks, macroeconomics, and finance.

Sirui Li

Doctoral Student Hammer Fellow
Sirui Li received her SB in Computer Science and Mathematics from Washington University in 2019 and was one of the five class of 2019 valedictorians from the Washington University School of Engineering. She is especially interested in Bayesian methods, social networks, and machine learning applications to economics and political science. She wants to develop and improve algorithms that could have a positive social impact.

Selected publications:
The Congressional Classification Challenge: Domain Specificity and Partisan Intensity

Manon Revel

Doctoral Student Hammer Fellow
Manon Revel earned her BNG in Mathematics from Ecole Centrale in Paris, France in 2017 and her SM in Technology and Policy from MIT in 2019. Manon studied the challenges that journalism faces online among the wide variety of information sources, and researched the impact of native advertisement on the U.S. news industry. She aspires to investigate practical solutions to improve the journalism situation. Further, she is interested in uncovering the cognitive processes that drive misinformation. Outside of her academic pursuits, Manon loves playing basketball and playing the piano four hands.

Manon on LinkedIn

Arnab Sarker

Doctoral Student Hammer Fellow
Arnab Sarker received his BSE in Networked and Social Systems and his MSE in Data Science in 2019, both from the University of Pennsylvania. Arnab’s research interests lie primarily in statistical learning theory, algorithmic game theory, and social networks. Several of his recent projects have been focused on consequences of probability theory, algorithmic game theory, and optimization in statistical learning theory.

Erin Walk

Doctoral Student Hammer Fellow
Erin Walk received her BA in Mechanical Engineering and minor in Government from Harvard University in 2017, where she was also a letter winner on the Women’s Varsity Lightweight Rowing team. Her undergraduate work in clean energy research inspired an interest in melding policy and social concerns with engineering work. Post-graduation she worked as a Policy Analyst at Cloudflare, supporting their corporate social responsibility projects both as a program manager and by providing technical support and on-boarding guidance. In this role, she spoke with state and local election authorities, as well as journalists and other vulnerable groups online, to help ensure their websites remained available. She plans to continue this work while at MIT, using data to better understand Internet attacks from both a political and engineering perspective.

Erin’s blog

Kiran Garimella

Postdoctoral Hammer Fellow
Before joining MIT as a postdoc at IDSS, Kiran Garimella was a postdoc at EPFL, Switzerland. His research focuses on using digital data for social good, including areas like polarization, misinformation, and human migration. His work on studying and mitigating polarization on social media won the best student paper awards at WSDM 2017 and WebScience 2017. Kiran received his PhD at Aalto University, Finland, and Masters & Bachelors from IIIT Hyderabad, India. Prior to his PhD, he worked as a Research Engineer at Yahoo Research, Barcelona, and QCRI, Doha.

Cate Heine

Doctoral Student Hammer Fellow
Cate Heine graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Centre College in Danville, KY with a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics. Her education at Centre was funded by a Brown Fellowship, which enabled her to pursue research opportunities at the University of Queensland’s Sustainable Minerals Institute and the Santa Fe Institute during the summers. In her doctoral work, Cate seeks to use technology to holistically assess social systems in rapidly growing urban areas, examine the social and physical barriers that persist in these systems, and address the consequent superlinear growth of social inequality.

Manxi Wu

Doctoral Student Hammer Fellow
Manxi Wu is a doctoral student in the Social and Engineering Systems program. Previously, she obtained a B.S. in Applied Math from Peking University (2015) and an M.S. in Transportation from MIT (2017). Manxi’s academic training is in game theory, network optimization, and applied statistics. Her research focuses on the design of information and incentive mechanisms to improve the efficiency and robustness of urban systems. She also works on security assessment of networked systems against adversarial attacks. Manxi was awarded the inaugural MIT IDSS Hammer Fellowship in 2018. Her M.S. thesis was awarded the 2017 Milton Pikarsky Memorial Award by the Council of University Transportation Centers.

Selected publications:
“Value of Information Systems in Routing Games,” with Saurabh Amin and Asuman E. Ozdaglar. 1st round revision in Operations Research.
“Securing Infrastructure Facilities: When Does Proactive Defense Help?” with Saurabh Amin. Dynamic Games and Applications, 2018.

Leon Yao

Doctoral Student Hammer Fellow
Leon Yao graduated from Stanford with a B.S. and an M.S. in Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence Track). Leon’s research is primarily focused on computational social science. Specifically, Leon aims to develop algorithms and analytical frameworks to analyze and understand social systems, such as social networks. Leon hopes to apply his knowledge of machine learning, data mining and algorithms to study problems in the intersection of economics and computer science.