Our Team

Nathan Matias, PhD, organizes citizen behavioral science for a safer, fairer, more understanding internet. A Guatemalan American, Nathan is an assistant professor in the Cornell University Department of Communication and field member in Information Science. Nathan is founder of the Citizens and Technology Lab, a public-interest research group at Cornell that organizes citizen behavioral science and consumer protection research for digital life. CAT Lab has worked with communities of tens of millions of people on reddit, Wikipedia, and Twitter to test ideas for preventing harassment, broadening diversity on social media, responding to human/algorithmic misinformation, managing political conflict, and auditing social technologies. Nathan is also pioneering industry-independent evaluations on the impact of tech platform policies in society. Before Cornell, Nathan conducted research at Princeton University, the MIT Media Lab, and Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. He publishes in The Atlantic, PBS, the Guardian, FiveThirtyEight, and other international media.

Jamila Michener, PhD, studies poverty, racism, and public policy, with a particular focus on health and housing. Her research investigates the ways public policy and political institutions shape the material and political lives of economically and racially marginalized denizens, as well as the ways members of such groups gain power to affect policy. She is author of the award-winning book, Fragmented Democracy: Medicaid, Federalism, and Unequal Politics. She is Associate Dean for Public Engagement at the Brooks School of Public Policy, co-director of the Cornell Center for Health Equity, co-director of the Politics of Race, Immigration, Class and Ethnicity (PRICE) research initiative, and board chair of the Cornell Prison Education Program.