The MiiE Team

Anjali Adukia
Faculty Director, Co-Founder, Principal Investigator

Emileigh Harrison
Founding Member, Principal Investigator
Emileigh Harrison is a PhD student at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy where her doctoral studies are focused on education and inequality. Her research interests include non-traditional education paths such as community college and homeschooling. Specifically she is interested in the impact of stricter homeschooling regulations on health and academic outcomes for homeschooled children. She is also a doctoral fellow at the Center for Data and Computing (CDAC).
My favorite movie as a child was Mulan. I loved her determination and how she rejected society’s idea of a “perfect/honorable woman” to save her family.

Alex Eble
Co-Founder, Principal Investigator

Elisa Xi Chen
Director of Computer Vision, Junior Investigator
Elisa joins the MiiE Lab with the belief that every child needs a superhero or role model that shares the same attributes as them to be the best version of themselves. And children’s books are one of the first few sites that compete for representation. Prior to joining the MiiE Lab, Elisa has worked for several non-profit organizations nation-wide on the intersection of data science, law, development, and public policy, including Asian Law Caucus, UChicago Crime and Education Lab, and the Coase-Sandor Institute for Law and Economics.
Among many adventures and surreal experiences in children’s books, Elisa’s greatest childhood fantasy is to become a member of the X-men, a band of mutants and visionaries who work together towards something bigger than themselves. With that dream in mind, she is ready to embark on her journey at the MiiE lab.

Jake Nicoll
Junior Investigator
Jake is a second year in the MS-CAPP Program at Harris. He graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in Math and Physics. He then entered Harris in hopes of gaining data science skills and pursuing a career in policy research. In particular, he is interested in education policy, as well as in how early-childhood influences can shape education-related outcomes. He is excited about the creativity of MiiE Lab’s application of NLP techniques to the text of children’s books, and he hopes to participate in this frontier-pushing approach to quantifying representation in these texts. When Jake was growing up, a book that resonated with him was Timothy Twinge. The
book was about a boy who got overly anxious about ridiculous things, with the common refrain of “Timothy Twinge worried a lot about things that might happen and things that might not.” The story was a helpful reminder for Jake, who struggled with anxiety, to
keep problems in perspective.

Hakizumwami Birali Runesha
Founding Member, Principal Investigator

Rachel White
Faculty Affiliate
Dr. White is a former local school board member/vice president and volunteer assistant high school cross country and track & field coach. She also previously served as a policy analyst for the Michigan Association for School Administrators and as the Associate Director of Policy and Advocacy for The Ohio College Access Network.

Teodora Szasz
Consultant
She serves as a catalyst for solving challenging questions in the research teams that she is supporting, such as: predicting oxygen support for COVID-19 patients, detecting prostate cancer, and analysis of messages related to identity in official educational setting. Teodora brings to the field practical expertise in state-of-the-art advanced technology: Supercomputers, Cloud Computing, Machine Learning, Image Analysis Techniques, and Big Data.
Prior to joining RCC, Teodora earned her doctorate degree in Computer Science at Toulouse University in France. She won international challenges (IUS PICMUS 2016) in beamforming for ultrasound medical imaging.
Dora cannot forget the long nights reading Jules Verne and imagining herself in all his adventures. So far, she has lived in four countries, she speaks more than four languages, and she is passionate about all kinds of technological innovations, e.g.,: wearable electronics. She is bringing to MiiE this call for adventure that she learned from her heroes: Professor Lidenbrock and Richard Kennedy.

Trishala Thakur
Predoctoral Scholar - Machine Learning Data Scientist
Trishala holds a Master’s degree in Data Science from the University of Colorado Boulder. Before graduate school, she worked at Schneider Electric, where she built predictive maintenance models and discovered a strong interest in applying data science to real-world challenges.
During her master’s, she worked on research projects that involved detecting droughts using satellite data and analyzing public perception of climate change through news transcript analysis. She also led independent projects focused on building end-to-end pipelines for automated model training.
Trishala is always on the lookout for meaningful problems and creative ways to solve them with data. She enjoys exploring new tools and approaches.

Celia Zhu
Junior Investigator

Matt Bonci
Machine Learning Data Scientist

Peter Bergman
Faculty Affiliate
Peter is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Texas at Austin and the founder of Learning Collider. He serves as Co-Chair of the Improving Education Outcomes in North America Initiative at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT and is a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is also an Innovation Fellow at Schmidt Futures; a Distinguished Affiliate at CESifo; and a Research Affiliate at the Institute for Labor Economics. In entrepreneurial research endeavors, he started EdNudge, which was acquired by AllHere, for which he remains an advisor.

Paula Dastres Gallardo
Data Scientist
our perception of the world.