Susana Cervantes: Susana Cervantes has served as the Mississippi Delta Fellow, a two-year position jointly sponsored by the Social Science Research Center and Harvard Law School. As the Fellow, she worked to explore and promote innovative solutions to poverty in the Mississippi Delta through law, policy, and community development. Prior to her fellowship, Susana studied at Harvard Law School, where she was a student leader in the Mississippi Delta Project and participated in a number of clinics and internships focused on education law and policy, youth and family issues, and systemic justice. Prior to that, Susana spent two years teaching high school English in Jackson, Mississippi with Teach for America. Susana received her A.B. in English from Harvard College in 2012 and her J.D. from Harvard Law School, magna cum laude, in 2017.

Cindy Bethel: Dr. Bethel is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at Mississippi State University (MSU). She is an ACM Distinguished Speaker (2017-2020) and in September 2017 was awarded the Billie J. Ball Endowed Professorship in Engineering (2017-2020), from the Bagley College of Engineering at MSU. She is the Director of the Social, Therapeutic, and Robotic Systems (STaRS) lab and a Research Fellow with the MSU Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems (CAVS) Human Performance Group. She is an affiliated faculty with the Department of Psychology. She is a Senior Editor for the International Journal of Human-Robot Interaction. She received her B.S. in Computer Science (summa cum laude) and her Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of South Florida. Her research interests include human-robot interaction, human-computer interaction, interface design, social robotics, and artificial intelligence. Her work focuses on the use of robots for therapeutic support, information gathering, law enforcement, and military applications. 

Viktorija Car: Dr. Car is an Associate Professor at the University of Zagreb, Croatia, at the Faculty of Political Science – Media and Communication Department. She got her Ph.D. degree at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia and during the doctoral study she spent one semester at the University of Lund, Sweden. In the focus of her scientific research are public service media, visual culture and visual media, media narratives, digital activism, media and gender studies, and media and minority studies. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the Media Studies journal and member of the Editorial Board of the Anali HPD journal published by the Croatian Political Science Association. She was member of the HRT Program Council 2011-2012, and she is one of the founders of the Free and Responsible Media group within the Human Rights House Zagreb.

Christopher Archibald: Dr. Archibald is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at Mississippi State University. He focuses his research and teaching primarily on the areas of Artificial Intelligence, Multiagent Systems, Robotics, and Machine Learning. He especially seeks to understand and evaluate decision-making algorithms in complex scenarios. He received his BS degree in Computer Engineering from Brigham Young University, his MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from Stanford University and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta. 

Ioannis Ziogas: Dr. Ziogas earned his PhD in Political Science from the University of Florida. His primary research interests revolve around the dynamics that promote peace or lead to violence in the international system, broadly defined. His work includes papers on territorial conflict, sampling algorithms, and survival modeling. Prior to entering academia, Dr. Ziogas worked as a diplomatic attaché at the European Union in Brussels, Belgium.

Taylor Shelton: Dr. Shelton is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geosciences at Mississippi State University. Prior to joining MSU in 2017, he held appointments as a visiting scholar in the Department of Geography at the University of Kentucky and as a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Urban Innovation at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Broadly-trained as a human geographer, Dr. Shelton earned BA and MA degrees in geography from the University of Kentucky and his PhD from the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University. Dr. Shelton’s work focuses on exploring the social and spatial dimensions of ‘big data’ and how these new sources of data are changing the way we think about, and intervene in, the world around us. In particular, he is interested in how mapping and data visualization can be used to develop alternative understandings of urban spaces and social inequalities.