Core Research Team

Milind Bangalore
Undergraduate Research Assistant

Milind Bangalore is a first-year undergraduate student at Princeton University, where he plans to study Operations Research and Financial Engineering. His academic interests include using artificial intelligence for social good. Towards this purpose, Milind has worked on software projects involving machine learning, mass spectrometry analysis,…

Thomas Espenshade
Principal Investigator

Thomas Espenshade is a Senior Scholar and Professor of Sociology, Emeritus in the Office of Population Research at Princeton University.  He has a broad background in social demography and has worked in the field of education for the past 15 years, first in higher education and more recently in early childhood education. His book 

Joanne Golann
Co-Principal Investigator

Joanne Golann is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Education in the Department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations at Peabody College, Vanderbilt University. She is interested in how children acquire different cultural “toolkits” through their experiences at home and at school. She is author of the book, Scripting the Moves:…

Richard Hall
Research Collaborator

Richard Hall is a postdoctoral fellow at Saint Louis University working as part of a research-practice partnership with Saint Louis Public Schools. He recently received his PhD in Leadership, Policy, and Organizations from Vanderbilt University's Peabody College. Prior to beginning a career in academia in 2017, Richard worked as a behavioral…

Jeff Himpele
Co-Investigator on the DDSS Grant

Jeffrey Himpele is a Lecturer in Anthropology and directs the Anthropology Department’s VizE Lab for Ethnographic Data Visualization, a unique hub of scholarship and resources that seeks to bring both data visualization and documentary film into the context of ethnography. As a collaborator on the NJFS Project, Jeffrey is working with…

Cecilia Kim
Undergraduate Research Assistant

Cecilia H. Kim is an undergraduate student at Princeton University pursuing a major in Chemistry and a certificate in Global Health Studies and Materials Science. She is interested in issues of educational equity and accessibility and is an Advising Fellow for Matriculate, a nonprofit organization that mentors high-achieving, low-income high…

Irene Kopaliani
Cloud Architect

Irene Kopaliani is a Cloud Architect for Princeton Research Computing. Leveraging her cybersecurity and cloud expertise, she is establishing secured research infrastructure for Princeton University faculty and researchers. She is also an advisory board member for three university computer science and computer engineering programs. Before…

Kristen Cuzzo Neri
Academic Assistant

Kristen joined Princeton University in 2018 as an Academic Assistant. She is now involved with the NJFS, editing the quarterly newsletters and maintaining its website. Kristen previously held the Assistant Director/Project Manager role for a market research company in southern New Jersey. 

Boriana Pratt
Statistical Programmer, Data Manager

Boriana Pratt is a statistical programmer at the Office of Population Research and the Data Manager for the New Jersey Families Study (NJFS). She has a Master’s degree in Biostatistics from the University of California, Berkeley, where she also worked for a number of years in the School of Public Health on a longitudinal study of…

Colin Swaney
Research Software Engineer

Colin Swaney is a Research Software Engineer for DDSS specializing in high-performance computing and data-intensive statistics. His work primarily focuses on developing tools and methodologies to solve computational challenges associated with large-scale social science data sets. Colin holds a PhD in Finance from the University of Iowa,…

Savannah Thais
Associate Research Scholar, IRIS-HEP Software Institute

Savannah Thais is a postdoc at Princeton University, where she primarily works on physics-informed machine learning (ML). She is currently developing accelerated ML-based reconstruction algorithms for the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Savannah's interest is in understanding the underlying scientific theory of machine learning,…

Jiatong Yu
Undergraduate Research Assistant

Jiatong Yu is a junior at Princeton University, majoring in Computer Science and specializing in computer vision and systems design. She hopes to build AI infrastructures that enable data-driven analysis in social studies. Her current work at NJFS involves video processing and search engine design.