---
title: 2021 Workshop Speakers
tags: workshop-2021
---

## Session 1
**(Thursday, 2-3.30 UK)**

### Keynote: Kai Spiekermann

Kai Spiekermann is Professor of Political Philosophy at the London School of Economics. Among his research interests are normative and positive political theory, philosophy of the social sciences, social epistemology and environmental change. He is particularly interested in applying formal methods, computational simulations, and experiments to problems in political philosophy. His recent publications have focused on mechanisms of norm avoidance, strategic ignorance and moral knowledge, on information aggregation, jury theorems and epistemic democracy, and on reductionism and holism in the social sciences.

### Panel

#### Cecília Tomori

Cecília Tomori is an anthropologist and public health scholar whose work addresses health inequities through teaching, research, and active engagement in global and community health. Her research investigates the structural and sociocultural drivers that shape patterns of health and illness, with a focus on maternal and child health as well as sexual and reproductive health. This work centers on deep engagement with the lived experiences of local and global communities. Dr. Tomori has collaborated with colleagues at Johns Hopkins and beyond on breastfeeding, infant sleep, and infectious disease prevention. She has authored three books on breastfeeding and reproduction, and numerous publications on a range of public health issues in journals including Social Science and Medicine, Maternal Child Nutrition, AIDS and Behavior, Archives of Sexual Behavior, and BMC Public Health. Dr. Tomori holds a joint appointment in the Department of Population, Family, and Reproductive Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

#### Timothy Caulfield

Timothy Caulfield is a Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy, a Professor in the Faculty of Law and the School of Public Health, and Research Director of the Health Law Institute at the University of Alberta. His interdisciplinary research on topics like stem cells, genetics, research ethics, the public representations of science and public health policy has allowed him to publish over 350 academic articles. He has won numerous academic and writing awards and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences. He contributes frequently to the popular press and is the author of two national bestsellers: The Cure for Everything: Untangling the Twisted Messages about Health, Fitness and Happiness (Penguin 2012) and Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything?: When Celebrity Culture and Science Clash (Penguin 2015). His most recent book is Relax, Dammit!: A User's Guide to the Age of Anxiety (Penguin Random House, 2020). Caulfield is also the host and co-producer of the award winning documentary TV show, A User's Guide to Cheating Death, which has been shown in over 60 countries, including streaming on Netflix in North America.

#### Geoffrey Supran
Geoffrey Supran is a Research Associate in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University and Director of Climate Accountability Communication at the Climate Social Science Network headquartered at Brown University. Working alongside Professor Naomi Oreskes at Harvard, Geoffrey uses quantitative and qualitative applied social science techniques to study the history of global warming politics; particularly the climate denial, delay, and propaganda tactics of fossil fuel interests.

Geoffrey’s research and organizing have been covered by most major news outlets. He is also a frequent contributor and commentator in international media, such as PBS Newshour, The New York Times, The LA Times, The Financial Times, and The Guardian.

From 2012-16, Geoffrey co-led the fossil fuel divestment campaign at MIT, which precipitated the Institute’s first climate action plan. In 2016, Geoffrey helped organize the first major scientist protests against the Trump administration.

#### Kai Kupferschmidt
Kai is a contributing correspondent for Science magazine based in Berlin, Germany. He writes about infectious diseases as well as food science, nutrition, evolution and science policy. Kai received a diploma in molecular biomedicine from the University of Bonn, Germany and later visited the Berlin Journalism School.
In 2013 Kai won the Journalism Prize of the German AIDS Foundation. He is the author of a book about the color blue, published in 2019.

#### Arend Kuester

Arend has been working in the publishing industry for over 25 years as an enthusiastic, international senior executive with deep experience in STM business strategy, sales and marketing, and academic journal development. Arend is particularly passionate in developing sustainable and innovative publishing solutions and contributing to the global transition to Open Science. After working as Director Open Research Group for Springer Nature in China and setting up Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation/QScience in Qatar, he is bringing first-hand experience of the global context to facilitate the exchange of research and ideas to contribute to scientific progress.

## Session 2
**(8.30-10 UK)**
### Keynote: Deepti Gurdasani
I am a clinical epidemiologist and statistical geneticist by background. After completing my MBBS and MD in Internal Medicine at Christian Medical College, Vellore, India, I completed my MPhil in Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Cambridge in 2010, followed by a PhD in examination of genetic factors associated with disease in genetically diverse populations (2013). My subsequent work as a post-doctoral fellows at the Wellcome Sanger Institute focused on the study of population history, and historical migration across Africa (as co-lead of the African Genome Variation Project). As a senior staff-scientist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, I co-led the Uganda Genome Resource Project (Gurdasani et al., Cell, 2019), studying genetic determinants of disease across ethnically diverse populations.
My research interests range from the development of new statistical methodology for population genetics, genome-wide association studies and genomic prediction, to developing new pipelines for drug discovery using large-scale multi-dimensional data.

### Panel
#### Joshua Becker
My research examines how teams, organizations, and societies can optimize their decision making. My article in the Harvard Business Review provides a quick overview of how group intelligence can overcome cognitive biases and improve belief accuracy.

My ongoing research examines how we can design communication processes to maximize collective intelligence with minimal intervention.

#### Niccolo Pescetelli
My main research focus is on decision-making and information processes in social contexts. I’m interested in how people interacting together share, transform and integrate information in order to make individual and collective decisions, often reaching outstanding results. I want to investigate the properties of networks of recursively interacting agents by studying their behaviour and dynamics in opinion space. In particular I’m looking at how people decisions and sense of confidence are affected by social interaction. The main tools I’m using are Signal Detection Theory (SDT), Agent-Based modeling, Bayesian theory and behavioral analysis.

#### Aleks Berditchevskaia
Aleks Berditchevskaia is the Principal Researcher at Nesta’s Centre for Collective Intelligence Design.
She is the lead author of the report, ‘The Future of Minds & Machines’, on combining human and machine intelligence for problem solving. She is also a co-author of the ‘Playbook for Collective Intelligence Design’, a toolkit for creating projects that mobilise collective intelligence, which has been used to train over 370 staff as part of the UNDP's Accelerator Lab network. In 2019, she designed and ran Nesta's Crowd Forecasting challenge in partnership with BBC Future and the Good Judgement Project.
She holds a PhD in Neuroscience from Imperial College London. Prior to Nesta, Aleks worked in science policy, covering a range of topics from the role of citizen science in research and innovation to the societal implications of machine learning.

#### Philipp Lorenz-Spreen

Empowering democratic discourse in a networked society through improved online environments, or how to combine micro and macro perspectives on collective decision-making to improve self-organized online discourse.

When do quantitative increases in our communication cause qualitative changes in our collective behaviour?

How can the informative potential of the Internet be used to empower better informed and autonomous decisions?

What are ways to promote truth, autonomy and democratic discourse online, through design and context?

Previously, I did my PhD at the TU Berlin on empirical methods and theoretical models to describe the dynamics of collective attention from online data sets. At the LMU in Munich I studied physics with a focus on systems biophysics.

#### Sune Lehmann (provisional)
I’m a Professor of Networks and Complexity Science at DTU Compute, Technical University of Denmark. I’m also a Professor of Social Data Science at the Center for Social Data Science (SODAS), University of Copenhagen.

My work focuses on quantitative understanding of social systems based on massive data sets. A physicist by training, my research draws on approaches from the physics of complex systems, machine learning, and statistical analysis. I work on large-scale behavioral data and while my primary focus is on modeling complex networks, my research has made substantial contributions on topics such as human mobility, sleep, academic performance, complex contagion, epidemic spreading, and behavior on twitter.