McCourt School of Public Policy
Massive Data Institute
Massive Data Institute

MDI Fellows

MDI is pleased to host a group of postdoctoral and policy fellows each academic year. Fellowships are advanced scholarly appointments for one or more academic years. Fellows engage in advanced independent and/or directed research with colleagues at the Massive Data Institute. In addition, fellows lead or participate in several data-oriented workshops and academic conferences at Georgetown and at partner institutions. As junior scholars in their field, fellows contribute to the intellectual life of the McCourt School and help build relationships across disciplines and departments within the University.

Current Fellows

Le Bao, PhD – Post Doctoral Fellow

Dr. Le Bao is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massive Data Institute at the McCourt School of Public Policy working with the Environmental Impact Data Collaborative (EIDC) team and the Measuring Online Social Attitudes and Information Collaborative (MOSAIC) team. His research focuses on geospatial methods, Bayesian statistics, and survey research. Dr. Bao received his Ph.D. in political science from American University. He was also previously a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University. 

explore his work here

James Carey, J.D. – Justice Fellow

James Carey works with the Executive Director and the Institute’s distinguished fellows on projects which explore how technology law and policy can advance justice in the world. These projects include the Civil Justice Data Commons, the institute’s academic programs and educational events, and research into cutting-edge policy problems.

explore his work here

Rupayan Mallick, PhD – Post Doctoral Fellow

Dr. Rupayan Mallick is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massive Data Institute at the McCourt School of Public Policy and the Department of Computer Science. His research interests include Generative AI, Explainable AI, and Multimodal Learning. He is currently exploring the generative models of deep learning such as diffusion models for different data modalities. Dr. Mallick completed his Ph.D. from University of Bordeaux (LaBRI and INRIA), France in Computer Science specializing in Explainable Deep Learning.

explore his work here

Helge-Johannes Marahrens, PhD – Post Doctoral Fellow

 Dr. Helge Marahrens is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massive Data Institute at the McCourt School of Public Policy and at the Institute for the Study of International Migration working on developing indicators of forced migration using social media and digital archives. He received a PhD in Sociology and a MS in Applied Statistics from Indiana University, where he taught several Python workshops.

explore his work here

Stephanie Straus, M.Ed. – Policy Fellow

Stephanie Straus facilitates the linking of previously un-linked datasets to inform pressing policy issues across education, public health, and the civil justice system. Stephanie also advocates for secure data governance models that address the legal and regulatory risks involved with data sharing.

explore her work here

Lucy Qin, PhD – Post Doctoral Fellow

Dr. Lucy Qin is a Postdoctoral Associate and Fritz Fellow. Broadly, her background is in applied cryptography and usable security/privacy. She recently completed her PhD in Computer Science at Brown University where the focus of her thesis was on designing novel cryptographic protocols in support of public policy use cases. At Georgetown, she will be working on projects related to privacy issues and the collection/use of genetic data. She will also be continuing prior work with Elissa Redmiles on deterring image-based sexual abuse.

explore her work here

Brandon Waldon, PhD – Post Doctoral Fellow

Dr. Brandon Waldon is a linguist by training, and his research is in the subfields of semantics and pragmatic, in other words, how context, linguistic structure, and social cognition jointly enable human beings to use and comprehend language. He received his PhD at Stanford, where he recently completed a dissertation on the interpretation of epistemic modals. At MDI he is interested in applying linguistic theory and methods in ways that can inform how lawyers, judges, and the public navigate hard problems of legal textual analysis. 

explore his work here

Nathan Wycoff, PhD – Data Science Fellow

Dr. Nathan Wycoff is a Data Science Fellow at the Massive Data Institute at the McCourt School of Public Policy working on the Forced Migration and Data Privacy teams. Dr. Wycoff received his PhD in statistics from Virginia Tech.

explore his work here

Non-Resident Fellow Application

MDI is launching a new type of fellowship that allows individuals to contribute to the technology and policy conversation taking place at MDI.

Learn More Here

Christopher Dick

Jaren Haber

Elizabeth Jacobs

J.J. Naddeo

Agoritsa Polyzou

Garrett Quenneville

Joseph Shaheen

Laila Wahedi

Yifang Wei