Aditi Bawa

Pursuing B.S. Custom-Designed Major: Evidence-Based Public Policy, Drexel University

Aditi is a custom-designed major studying evidence-based public policy. She is interested in understanding the processes by which research makes its way into government while considering social and political contexts. Currently, she is doing her undergraduate senior thesis on the particular interactions between academia and public policy. From this research she hopes to gain insights on the formal and informal mechanisms by which policy change happens and go on to complete a graduate degree in the STS field.

John Bowman

Software Developer, 2020 - present
B.S. Computer Science, Lebanon Valley College

John is a software developer with over 20 years experience with databases and data processing. His passion is creating simple and effective tools that help IT professionals interface with data more easily. He works with the Air Watch Bay Area team to improve backend data processing for the website.

Hiep Nguyen

Research Assistant, April 2021 - present
Pursuing B.A. in Mathematics, Drexel University

Hiep is a pre-junior majoring in math, and he joins Fair Tech Collective as a research assistant. Besides math, he enjoys learning computer science and data science. He is currently obtaining data from online sources to create an accessible and usable database for refinery benzene data.

Amos Akinola

Amos worked on sensor data from Bay Area oil refinery air pollution sensors mainly gathered from ESDR, an open source data repository intended for storing and retrieving time series environmental data. By writing open-source analysis script for the project, Amos examined the relationship between Bay Area oil refinery air pollution and pollution in the residential areas close to the refineries. He is excited about the potential to leverage modern data analysis to advance citizen science efforts for critical environmental justice issues.

Kelsey is a former Drexel co-op student who has been working on the upkeep of the Fair Tech Collective media pages. She has researched different means of adding visual monitoring as well as helped with the design of parts of the final reports on the Meaning from Monitoring project. She is moving on to pursue a graduate degree in Public Policy with a focus in Environmental Policy and is thankful for the opportunity to work with Environmental Justice communities and learn firsthand how citizen science and access to clear, usable data is vital in aiding such communities in accomplishing their social and political goals.

Sarah was a Summer of Maps Fellow at Azavea and she conducted a geospatial data analysis project with the Fair Tech Collective investigating petrochemical pollution footprint in the San Francisco Bay area. She is passionate about the use of maps and spatial analysis to expose and communicate issues of environmental injustice. She had a great time working with the Fair Tech Collective to analyze petrochemical pollution and map its spread throughout the San Francisco Bay area. See her blog on the project here.

Amy’s research interests include computational social science, urban analytics and machine learning. Her work at the Fair Tech Collective was part of the Meaning from Monitoring Project, developing web and mobile technology for fenceline communities. As president of the Drexel Women in Computing Society, she earned the Association for Computing Machinery's Council on Women in Computing Student Seed Fund Award for her work developing a new model for sustained mentorship.

Kristen has been with the Collective for about two years. At present, she is thinking about community-expert interactions, particularly how installed base and organizational capacity influences an expert’s ability to develop meaningful collaborations with community groups. She is interested in the intersection of science and society, particularly how physical and life science information is conveyed outside the research lab. Her goals are to help researchers convey complex topics to the public in engaging ways. Currently, she is looking at citizen-scientist interactions and what components are necessary for scientists to forge meaningful collaborations.

As a Data Analyst, Niklas worked on data validation, analysis, and wrote an open-source analysis script for the Collective that examined the relationship between Bay Area oil refinery air pollution and personal health outcomes. He was excited about the potential to leverage modern data analysis to advance citizen science efforts for critical environmental justice issues. The Bay Area is his home, and he appreciated the opportunity to apply his skillset towards concrete outcomes.

As a GRA for the Meaning from Monitoring project, Taylor helped design, plan, and implement our participatory design workshop and the subsequent testing. Additionally, they designed and implemented an online survey for members of fenceline communities to help better understand how current data access tools are being used and what characteristics make them more helpful in making ethical claims. Working with the Fair Tech Collective gave them a rare opportunity to learn, through practice, valuable skills for their career as a scholar while engaging meaningfully with a community that’s directly affected by the neoliberal regulatory and social patterns he studies.

Jordan has joined the Fair Tech Collective as a research assistant. During her time at the Collective she has been researching online learning practices and engagement mechanisms. Jordan plans on supplementing that material with research on several political theories to restructure a course on engineering ethics. This course is intended to build a bridge between political theory and science and technology studies. Jordan is currently finishing her third year of her Bachelors degree with plans of attending law school in the fall. She is most passionate about social justice and human rights and plans on centering these causes in her career in the future.

Sarah is passionate about the environment and individuals rights to it, which plays a great role in how research is done and how policies are made. Her work at the Fair Tech Collective, which has turned into her Master’s Project, is based on community led citizen science and peer review. From her work she hopes to learn more about the interactions between a dominantly professional practice, peer review, and citizen science and, more specifically, if traditional peer review is useful and confers status to those citizen science communities seeking change.

Annie joined Fair Tech Collective this year as a research assistant. In her research so far she is working to analyze comments made in response to the EPA's 2015 Refinery Rule as well as comments in the Lousiana Bucket Brigade's community reporting site (IWitness data). She has then used the main themes and arguments found in both comment sets to review the effectiveness of current environmental policy for fenceline communities need.