Daniel Shawl serves as a project coordinator at Mississippi State University’s Social Science Research Center. He began working at the SSRC in the fall of 2021. Shawl coordinates the Research and Development of MASEP, as well as various other projects involving topics such as recidivism, substance abuse, juvenile justice, etc. Shawl earned a B.A. in Anthropology from Mississippi State University in 2017, and an M.A. in Anthropology with a focus on Archaeology from the University of Mississippi in 2021. Prior to his work at the SSRC, Shawl worked as an archaeologist for Mississippi State University for over three years, and worked as a National Park Ranger for the Natchez Trace Parkway. During his career as a student and archaeologist he did extensive research on the early Natchez people and the chronological dating of the construction of their ancient capital. Through his experience in Archaeology and Anthropology, Shawl brings a unique skill set into the Social Science Research Center and the projects he works on.

Anna Gjika, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Sociology at SUNY New Paltz, where she teaches courses in criminology and also serves as Director of the Criminology Concentration. Her research interests include exploring the relationships between gender, crime, youth, and technology, particularly as they pertain to sexual harm and sociolegal responses to gender-based violence. Her work has been published in Crime, Media, Culture, and the International Journal for Crime, Justice, and Social Democracy, among others. She is the author of the award-winning book, When Rape Goes Viral: Youth and Sexual Assault in the Digital Age (2024, University of California Press).

Clay Hardwick is program manager of the Center for Cyber Innovation (CCI) Open-Source Intelligence Lab (OSIL) at Mississippi State University (MSU), where he researches the application of open-source intelligence to our country’s most pressing national security challenges. Clay is a retired Army officer who spent his career working in intelligence and as a foreign area officer (FAO), primarily in the Middle East.Clay holds a Masters in Middle East Studies from University of Texas at Austin and a Masters in International Security Studies from the University of Arizona. After retiring from the Army but before working in the OSIL, Clay worked as the Senior Research Security Analyst in MSU’s Office of Research Compliance and Security (ORC&S), where he worked on implementation of National Security Presidential Memorandum-33, the federal government’s directive to strengthen protections of U.S. Government-sponsored research against foreign government interference and exploitation.

Chris Lightsey joined CCI in 2016 as a Research Engineer. He holds a B.S. degree in computer science from Mississippi State University. Chris has been involved in projects focusing on the areas of data visualization, machine learning, supercomputing, natural language processing, open-source intelligence, and computer security. He is currently working on machine learning applications in the analysis of publicly available data with a focus on social media and news analytics. He has worked on projects funded by the Department of Energy, Department of Defense, and the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center.

Sierra Nelson is a Research Associate at the Mississippi State University Social Science Research Center and MSU's High Performance Computing Center (HPC2). She is also a criminology doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology. Her current projects and publications utilize open source intelligence and open source data to examine online extremism, online radicalization, and the spread of online propaganda. She is also engaged in research examining social media sentiments surrounding highly publicized events—including those pertaining to mass violence. Sierra's other research interests include school safety research, school bullying, spatial variations in suicide, and policy analysis. Sierra strives to create scalable research that can result in both impactful and sustainable social change.

Sierra Nelson received a B.S. in Social Justice and Criminology from Delta State University and an M.S. in Sociology from Mississippi State University. She expects to complete her Ph.D. in Sociology at Mississippi State University by the Spring of 2024.

Mohammad Marufuzzaman (Maruf), Ph.D., received his Ph.D. in Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISE) from Mississippi State University (MSU) in 2014. He is currently an Associate Professor, Graduate Coordinator, and Associate Department Head at the ISE department at MSU. His research interests lie in the intersection of stochastic programming and deep learning, with specific application areas in the supply chain, security, and bioenergy. Till now, Dr. Maruf has secured ~$24.3 million in research grants (from federal and industry), published 75 journal articles, including articles in Transportation Science, IISE Transactions, Computers & Operations Research, Omega, and Annals of Operations Research, mentored 3 postdocs, and graduated 17 Ph.D. and 6 masters’ students. Dr. Maruf’s work has been widely recognized in the Industrial and System Engineering professional communities. He received multiple Best Paper Awards from IISE and INFORMS. He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Cleaner Production and Journal of Cleaner Logistics and Supply Chain and an Editorial Board member of the Computers & Industrial Engineering journal.

Katerina Sergi is an educational psychologist with the goal to transform quantitative and qualitative data into visual insights so that researchers, educators, and communities make informed decisions.

Lauren Etheredge is a Research Associate at Mississippi State University’s Social Science Research Center. She received her B.A. in Sociology and her B.S. in Psychology from Mississippi State in December of 2023. Her primary research interests include social determinants of physical and mental health, LGBT+ health and life outcomes, racial disparities in health and life outcomes, ADHD and Autism assessment, and impacts of AI and social media use. Her undergraduate honors thesis examined barriers to mental healthcare among college students using an intersectional approach.

Dr. Megan Stubbs-Richardson is an Assistant Research Professor at the Social Science Research Center. She directs the Data Science for Social Sciences Laboratory at the SSRC and is leading one of the missions of the laboratory to identify victimization patterns via social media analytics. Megan has been a PI or Co-PI on projects funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institute of Justice (NIJ), Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA), and the Department of Defense (DoD). She has conducted social media data analyses at the SSRC since 2012. In her research, she uses open source data to identify crime patterns and trends for gender-based violence and crime prevention techniques. She is currently leading a team to build an open-source data visualization tool for the COVID-19 Online Prevalence of Emotions in Institutions Database (COPE-ID). Using COPE-ID, she is also conducting research studies on COVID-19 misinformation alongside identifying emotions expressed throughout the COVID-19 pandemic for NSF funded projects. In early 2024, Megan and colleagues additionally released the open-source Artificial Intelligence Applications for Social Science Research database, which includes 250 AI tools that can be used for literature reviews, data collection or analyses, and research dissemination. 

Dr. Ben Porter is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Psychology at Mississippi State University (formerly an Assistant Research Professor at the SSRC). He holds a PhD from University of Houston in Social Psychology with a minor in Psychological Statistics and Data Analysis. He has extensive experience in advanced data analytics including structural equation modeling, latent class analysis, missing data theory, and using data with complex structures.Ben’s recent research has focused on various health outcomes of military service members and veterans, particularly using social media as a data source. Additionally, he has several projects using large archival datasets to answer health questions in this domain.  

 

Karissa Bergene, PhD is the Assistant Director of Research Operations, Critical Infrastructure Systems Protection (CISP) Lab, Sid and Reva Dewberry Department of Civil, Environmental, and Infrastructure Engineering (CEIE) at George Mason University (Mason). Bergene’s current projects investigate the interplay of crime patterns with internet technology, estimation of the acceleration of global coastal population settlements, and U.S. population mortality patterns. Her intellectual interests focus on the intersection between public administration and emergency management, public policy, public safety, critical infrastructure, and community resilience. She holds a PhD in Public Policy and Administration from Mississippi State University (MSU) and a Master of Public Administration and Bachelor of Science-Criminal Justice degrees from Appalachian State University. Before starting at the CISP Lab, she worked as Assistant Director of Research Operations for Mason’s Center for Resilient and Sustainable Communities, as Research Associate I and II at the Social Science Research Center at MSU, as a public administrator in local government, and as an intellectual property administrator in the private sector.

Dr. Cosby is a team member of the Data Science for Social Sciences Laboratory (DS3).  His current research is following a number of substantive pathways that benefit from data science innovations.  With a group of colleagues, he is investigating the acceleration of human population along the coast of the earth based on the capabilities inherent in Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s LandScan data.  With another group, he is researching the place-based social determinants of human mortality in the United States using the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Compressed Mortality File.  He is also collaborating with projects that are informed by such data sources as Twitter, Google Trends and Google N-grams.

 

Cindy L. Bethel, Ph.D. (IEEE and ACM Senior Member) is a professor in the computer science and engineering department and holds the Billie J. Ball Endowed Professorship in Engineering at Mississippi State University (MSU). She was the 2019 U.S. Fulbright Senior Scholar sponsored by the University of Technology Sydney. 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 Human Performance Group, and the MSU Social Science Research Center. She is a lifetime member of the Academy of Distinguished Teachers in the Bagley College of Engineering at MSU. She also was awarded the 2014-2015 ASEE New Faculty Research Award for Teaching. Cindy was recently elected to the Board of Directors for the Computing Research Association. She was also named by Analytics Insight as one of the "Worlds 50 Most Renowned Women in Robotics." She has been active in her professional research community serving on the Steering Committee for the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). She will serve as the upcoming General Co-Chair for the HRI Conference in 2021 in Boulder, CO. She was an NSF/CRA/CCC Computing Innovation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Social Robotics Laboratory at Yale University. From 2005 - 2008, she was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and was the recipient of the 2008 IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Graduate Fellowship. She graduated in August 2009 with her Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of South Florida. Her research interests include human-robot interaction, human-computer interaction, robotics, and artificial intelligence. Her research focuses on applications associated with robotic therapeutic support, information gathering from children, and the use of robots for law enforcement, search and rescue, and the military.

  

Dr. J. Edward Swan II is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Mississippi State University.  He holds a B.S. (1989) degree in computer science from Auburn University and M.S. (1992) and Ph.D. (1997) degrees in computer science from Ohio State University, where he studied computer graphics and human-computer interaction.  Before joining Mississippi State University in 2004, he spent seven years as a scientist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C.  Dr. Swan's research has centered on the topics of augmented and virtual reality, perception, human-computer interaction, human factors, empirical methods, computer graphics, and visualization.  Currently, he is studying the perception and technology required to give virtual objects definite spatial locations, including depth and layout perception and depth presentation methods, as well as empirical techniques for evaluating and validating visualizations.  His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Naval Research Laboratory, and the Office of Naval Research.  Dr. Swan is a member of ACM, IEEE, the IEEE Computer Society, and ASEE.  In 2017 and 2018, he served as Interim Department Head of Computer Science and Engineering at Mississippi State University.



 

Charlie Schloemer is the Systems Administrator at SSRC, helping to guide the design and implementation of DS3's computers, networks, and data security.  He has a bachelor's degree in mathematics from the University of Southern Mississippi. 

MacKenzie Paul is an Undergraduate Research Assistant working for the Social Science Research Center. In addition to her work in the DS3 lab, MacKenzie is leading projects examining religion and counseling efficacy in Mississippi and the social network effect on young adult romantic relationships. She will graduate as a double major in psychology and philosophy, with a concentration in religion, in Spring 2023.

Terri N. Hernandez, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, teaches public relations courses in the Department of Communication at Mississippi State University. Her research examines inter/intragroup relations, consumer behavior, and social and digital media as an intersection to organization-public relationships and branding. Her work has been published in the Journal of Consumer Marketing, Social Media and Society, and Computers & Human Behavior, among others.