Sera is an Associate Professor of Economics at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs in the University of Pittsburgh, where she founded the Center for Analytical Approaches for Social Innovation (CAASI), an incubator of community-co-created social justice data projects.

Maria João Sousa, joins Cornell Tech’s Public Interest Technology Initiative (PiTech) as PiTech Startup Postdoc in the Runway Program. In this new role, Maria will work as Incoming Executive Director at Climate Change AI (CCAI), a global non-profit that catalyzes impactful work at the intersection of climate change and machine learning. Before joining the PiTech Initiative, Maria pursued her PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, in Lisbon (Portugal), which she is set to defend in 2023. Her doctoral thesis focused on cooperative aerial robotics and artificial intelligence for wildfire detection and monitoring systems and was developed as a research fellow at both IDMEC in the Center of Intelligent Systems and at ADAI in the Forest Fire Research Center.

Nicki is an Associate Professor in the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech. She co-founded CETA in 2018 with Professor Tom Ristenpart in partnership with the New York City Mayor’s Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence. Nicki is excited to build connections between CETA and the PiTech community.