2021 Dietrich College Year in Review

2021 Dietrich College Year in Review

2021 YEAR IN REVIEW

Our 2021 Year in Review highlights the many ways in which the Dietrich College community has contributed to improving the human condition through education, research and community outreach. While the COVID-19 pandemic has continued to impact all of us, I remain proud of how we have come together to support one another. Students are once again benefitting from in-person academic experiences, and we remain flexible as we find creative approaches to resume our work and time-honored campus traditions. In this Year in Review, you’ll learn more about Dietrich College faculty who are working within and beyond their own disciplinary boundaries to make a positive impact on society. This past year, our experts were frequently sought after for their timely expertise on topics such as vaccine hesitancy, risk perception, race and identity and language and polarization. Our community outreach initiatives also have grown considerably. In 2021, Carnegie Mellon University launched the Center for Shared Prosperity, a significant step forward on the university’s commitment to deeper engagement with, and economic empowerment of, the broader Pittsburgh community. Through this center, which has an administrative home in Dietrich College, along with the Pittsburgh Summer Internship Program, Arts Greenhouse and LEAP, our students, faculty, staff and alumni are addressing real-world challenges with a focus on access, equity and self-expression. I invite you to read more about these and many other exciting developments in the pages that follow.

RICHARD SCHEINES Bess Family Dean, Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences

2 Community Outreach 5 D ietrich Deep Dives 6 Facts and Figures 8 Research and Scholarly Work 13 Academics and the Student Experience 22 New Leadership 24 Achievements 32  Recognition 36 Alumni

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YEAR IN REVIEW

Community Outreach

Carnegie Mellon, Heinz Endowments Launch Center for Shared Prosperity Carnegie Mellon University and The Heinz Endowments announced the launch of the Center for Shared Prosperity, an initiative to leverage the university’s internationally recognized strengths in applied research to address longstanding barriers to equity and foster economic empowerment in the greater Pittsburgh region. With an administrative home in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, the center aims to create a sustainable and replicable model for community-university collaboration, with a focus on deploying solutions for socio-economic inequities and making measurable progress toward greater economic prosperity and overall well-being of residents. The Heinz Endowments has committed $30 million over six years to the initiative. The grant, the largest in the Endowments’ history, includes funding to develop, pilot and scale region-wide interventions to identify and address structural barriers to access and opportunity. A portion of the grant will be used to establish an endowment to support the center’s work in perpetuity. Illah Nourbakhsh , K&L Gates Professor of Ethics and Computational Technologies, serves as the center’s inaugural executive director. The center’s staff includes Marlene Williams , operations director; Jay Manning , documentarian, and Jessica Kaminski and Jordan Mroziak , community engagement specialists. Learn more about the Center for Shared Prosperity and its Community Committee.

Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences | Carnegie Mellon University 2

LEAP Gives High Schoolers Deep Dive Into Arts, Humanities LEAP is a new pilot program that connects Pittsburgh students with CMU faculty and community artists and activists. The program creates an environment where students from lower-resourced backgrounds are exposed to higher education, as well as opportunities to express themselves artistically in ways that can be directed toward social justice and social change. LEAP, which stands for Leadership, Excellence, Access and Persistence, grew out of a collaboration between Nico Slate , head of CMU’s Department of History and LEAP faculty director, and Mark Barga , a City Charter High School social studies teacher. Sarah Ceurvorst (DC 2013) is LEAP’s inaugural director. Ayana Ledford , Dietrich College associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion, serves as chair of LEAP’s board of directors. Read more about the LEAP program .

Art and Community Change the Lives of Pittsburgh Youth Arts Greenhouse offers Pittsburgh middle school students the opportunity to speak up, speak out and change their lives through creative forms like writing, performance, visual arts and technological arts. Housed in the Dietrich College, the program began as an on-campus, hip hop-based education program that brought students from the greater Pittsburgh area to campus to create and record music. It has since expanded to offer programming to educators and students directly in their schools, meeting the community where its needs lie and fostering deeper social understanding and personal achievement of students who have a lot to say. Richard Purcell , associate professor of English, is the Arts Greenhouse’s director. Shun-Sho Carmack , who is currently pursuing a Master of Arts Management at CMU, is the program manager. Read more about the Arts Greenhouse program.

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YEAR IN REVIEW

Community Outreach

Pittsburgh Interns: Lend a Hand, Gain Experience The Pittsburgh Summer Internship Program (PSIP) provides financial support and resources to connect Dietrich College undergraduate students to their first internship experience at a nonprofit, startup or small business in the city. In 2021, 58 students completed remote, hybrid or in-person internships. Kim Piatt , Dietrich College’s director of experiential learning, leads program logistics and enriches the experience for students by expanding professional development workshops, enhancing relationships with host sites and improving program assessment efforts. Tim Wang , a junior majoring in information systems with minors in computer science, game design and physics, spent his summer working for EKTO VR, a startup creating virtual reality boots. Emma Reed , a senior global studies major with minors in engineering and Hispanic studies, spent her summer working at Smart Futures, a company that creates online career plans and portfolios for students from kindergarten to high school. Jordan Gilbert , a junior statistics and machine learning major, spent his summer working for Lifeware Labs, which develops wearable electronics to track people’s health. Learn more about PSIP .

Tim Wang

Emma Reed

Jordan Gilbert

Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences | Carnegie Mellon University 4

Dietrich Deep Dives

Dietrich College Takes a Deep Dive into Politics The Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences began exploring some of the major social issues of our time in greater detail in a new virtual series, “Dietrich Deep Dives.” The engaging sessions offered in-depth presentations about critical political and societal issues through the lens of the humanities, social sciences and related fields to students, staff, faculty and alumni. The 2021 series explored voting machine security, social media and cable news misinformation, conspiracy theories and voter suppression. The presentations are available on the Dietrich College website .

Electronic Voting Machine Security Michael Shamos , Distinguished Career Professor, School of Computer Science

Social Media and Misinformation Kathleen Carley, director, Center for Informed Democracy & Social- cybersecurity (IDeaS); professor, School of Computer Science and College of Engineering The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories Simon DeDeo , assistant professor, Dietrich College’s Department of Social and Decision Sciences

Voter Suppression and Voter Fraud Lisa Tetrault , associate professor, Dietrich College’s Department of History

Cable News and Misinformation Mark Kamlet , University Professor of Economics and Public Policy, Dietrich College’s Department of Social and Decision Sciences and the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy

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YEAR IN REVIEW

Facts and Figures

Members of Prestigious Professional Academies and Associations among current Dietrich College faculty and alumni

12 AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE 9 AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

6 NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 2 NATIONAL ACADEMY OF MEDICINE 1 NATIONAL ACADEMY OF ENGINEERING

1,477

363

45

215

42

12

1

154

26

Seeking 5%

Career Success Class of 2021

Other 3%

Continuing Education 21%

347 UNDERGRADUATES

71% Employed

Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences | Carnegie Mellon University 6

Student and Alumna Represent Dietrich College at Commencement

Four distinguished guests participated virtually in Carnegie Mellon University’s Class of 2021 Commencement exercises. Among them was CMU alumna Jewell P. Rhodes (DC 1975, 1976, 1979), the Piper Endowed Chair and founding artistic director of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University, who received a Doctor of Humane Letters. In addition, Maria Cristina Pullen , a recent graduate in professional writing and international relations and politics, spoke during the ceremony.

Jewell P. Rhode

Maria Cristina Pullen

Undergraduate degrees conferred 390

16  Science and Humanities Scholars with Dietrich College Majors

81  Master’s degrees conferred

34 Doctoral degrees conferred

Class of 2021 Job Outcomes Among the 90.6% of the Dietrich College class of 2021 reporting, 95% found employment, entered graduate school or pursued other interests, like volunteering or military service.

More than 150 organizations employed our graduates, including:

• Twilio • U.S. Department of Defense • U nited Way of Greater New Haven • Valnet

• Pixar • The Museum of Science • The Walt Disney Company • The Washington Post

• Accenture • Adobe • Brigham and Women’s Hospital

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YEAR IN REVIEW

Research and Scholarly Work

How Statisticians Write and Why

David Brown , associate teaching professor of English, and Michael Laudenbach , a rhetoric Ph.D. candidate, investigated how statistics students write by compiling a corpus of over 900 student papers. The pair used DocuScope — a text analysis tool created by Department of English professors David Kaufer and Suguru Ishizaki — to tag rhetorical and lexicogrammatical patterns in each paper. The statistical analyses identified differences between novice versus expert papers and client-facing versus academic papers. The researchers hope to translate their discoveries into training materials for teaching assistants. Read more about Brown and Laudenbach’s study .

Henry Posner III , chairman of Railroad Development Corporation (RDC) and adjunct professor in the Department of History, demonstrated his vision for a rail-based mass transit system in the United States. For the pilot project, Pop-Up Metro, an RDC affiliate, imported remanufactured passenger railcars from Britain to Rockhill Furnace in Pennsylvania. For the demonstration, Posner assembled a team of CMU affiliates involved in his course, “The American Railroad-Decline and Renaissance in the Era of Deregulation,” led by

Posner Lays Track for Future of Rail Transit

his teaching assistant Meg Richards . Watch a video of the battery train .

(from left) Meg Richards, Owen Sahnow and Henry Posner III.

Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences | Carnegie Mellon University 8

Leveraging Twitter to Understand Natural Disasters Gabriela Gongora-Svartzman , assistant teaching professor in Information Systems, a joint program of the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences and Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy, performed an analysis of more than 6 million Twitter posts spanning three major hurricanes that made landfall in 2017: Harvey (Texas), Irma (Florida) and Maria (Puerto Rico). Communities, participants and types of needs from citizens were then identified from these tweets. Their study developed a new method for measuring social cohesion, an important factor in a community’s resilience. Read more about the method .

Presidents’ Personalities and Democratic Erosion in Latin America, 1945–2012 Ignacio Arana , assistant teaching professor in the Institute for Politics and Strategy, examined overreaching presidential behavior common in Latin America between 1945 and 2012. During this time, 25 presidents from 14 countries tried to change their respective constitutions to increase their powers. Arana’s results demonstrate that presidents’ personalities offer a strong force behind their attempts to consolidate their authority. These findings challenge current approaches in presidential studies and have implications for the study of all types of political elites. Read more about the study .

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YEAR IN REVIEW

Research and Scholarly Work

A Touch Of Japan in Pittsburgh

In 1912, cherry trees were planted in Washington D.C. as a symbol of friendship and camaraderie between the United States and Japan. This magnificent, flowering tree, called “Sakura” in Japanese, has a meaning that extends far beyond pink and white petals. The tiny flowers urge introspection and inward reflections on the beauty of transience, along with the expansive enjoyment of spring. Barbara Litt , a senior lecturer of Japanese studies and a long- time board member of the Pittsburgh Sakura Project, discussed her scholarly pursuit of the Japanese language and culture at CMU. Read more about the cherry blossom talk .

When Drinking Alone Becomes A Problem Kasey Creswell , associate professor of psychology, has focused her career on understanding the mechanisms that lead to addiction. According to Creswell, understanding the social context in which drinking occurs has important implications for understanding who may be at risk for developing alcohol use disorder and the underlying mechanisms that increase risk. By focusing on the social context of alcohol use, Creswell aims to facilitate the research community’s understanding of the development of alcohol problems in adolescents and young adults. Read more about Creswell’s research .

Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences | Carnegie Mellon University 10

Charles C. Hoskinson and Jeremy Avigad

Philosophy Receives $20 Million to Establish Hoskinson Center for Formal Mathematics

“Carnegie Mellon has the resources and experts to take the study of formal mathematics and disseminate it in a meaningful way. We can bring together

Entrepreneur Charles C. Hoskinson has made a $20 million gift to Carnegie Mellon University to establish the Hoskinson Center for Formal Mathematics to advance mathematical research by improving global access to knowledge and resources for mathematics researchers, educators and learners. The Hoskinson Center will develop the technology and techniques needed to increase world-wide access to the power of formal mathematics. Jeremy Avigad , professor of philosophy in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences and professor of mathematical sciences in the Mellon College of Science, will lead the center and provide mentorship and guidance to direct research contributions and collaboration. Read about the new center .

the best minds in mathematics, computer science and machine

learning to create an infrastructure for using formal mathematics as a core educational tool. I am honored to be part of the creation of such an important center where collaboration, exploration and discovery opens the door to incentivizing and supporting mathematical activity and giving it the resources for advanced methods of automation.” — CHARLES C. HOSKINSON

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YEAR IN REVIEW

Research and Scholarly Work

Social and Decision Sciences Explores Complexities of COVID-19 Silvia Saccardo , assistant professor in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences, and colleagues conducted several studies to evaluate the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on students and society. They combined biometric and survey >Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44

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