2024 Jarislowsky Fellows

Evan Ackerman is the digital senior editor at IEEE Spectrum, the award-winning flagship publication of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

Since 2007, he has written over 6,000 articles on robotics and technology, on topics ranging from the emotional expressiveness of Disney’s robots and Tesla’s humanoid robot, to human-robot teams for first-responder situations where remote control and communications are unreliable. Evan has been a guest on NPR’s Science Friday and the BBC World Service. He has a degree in Martian geology and is excellent at playing bagpipes.

Amelia DeFalco is a professor of contemporary literature and member of the Medical Humanities Research Group at the University of Leeds. Her work concerns posthuman approaches to care, vulnerability, materiality and touch in contemporary cultural narratives.

In 2022 DeFalco led the AHRC Leadership Fellowship “Imagining Posthuman Care,” which investigated how representations of human/robot relationships imagine the ethical, political, and philosophical implications of nonhuman care. She currently leads research on cultural depictions of vulnerability, technology, and embodiment that theorize care beyond the human in two Wellcome Trust-funded projects: “LivingBodiesObjects” (2022-2025) and “Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures” (2020–2025). As part of this work, DeFalco co-edited a special issue of Senses and Society on the topic of “Affective Technotouch.” Defalco has appeared in podcasts such as the BMJ MH podcast and Living with Feeling, and written blog posts on care robots and artificial wombs. She has published three books: Uncanny Subjects: Aging in Contemporary Narrative (2010); Imagining Care: Responsibility, Dependency, and Canadian Literature (2016); Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care (2023); and co-edited the collection Ethics and Affects in the Fiction of Alice Munro (2018).

Ken Goldberg is an artist, inventor, and professor in the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department at the University of California, Berkeley with secondary appointments in EECS, Art Practice, the School of Information, and Radiation Oncology at the UCSF Medical School.

Ken is Director of the UC Berkeley AUTOLAB, where he and his students pursue research in geometric algorithms and machine learning for robotics and automation in surgery, manufacturing, and other applications. He is a former director of CITRIS "People and Robots" Initiative. He is also chief scientist at Ambi Robotics. Ken developed the first provably complete algorithms for part feeding and part fixturing and the first robot on the Internet. Despite agonizingly slow progress, Ken persists in trying to make robots less clumsy. He has over 200 peer-reviewed publications and eight U.S. Patents. He co-founded and served as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering. Ken's artwork has appeared in 70 exhibits, including the Whitney Biennial, and films he has co-written have been selected for Sundance and nominated for an Emmy Award. Ken was awarded the NSF PECASE (Presidential Faculty Fellowship) from President Bill Clinton in 1995, elected IEEE Fellow in 2005 and selected by the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society for the George Saridis Leadership Award in 2016. He lives in the Bay Area and is madly in love with his wife, filmmaker and Webby Awards founder Tiffany Shlain, and their two daughters. He is fiercely protective of his family, his students, and his frequent-flier miles.

AJung Moon is an experimental roboticist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at McGill University. She investigates how robots and AI systems influence the way people move, behave, and make decisions in order to inform how we can design and deploy such autonomous intelligent systems more responsibly.

At McGill University, she is the Director of the McGill Responsible Autonomy & Intelligent System Ethics (RAISE) lab. The RAISE lab is an interdisciplinary group that investigates the social and ethical implications of robots and AI systems and explores what it means for engineers to be designing and deploying such systems responsibly for a better, technological future. Moon is also an executive committee member of the IEEE Global Initiative for Ethical Considerations in Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems, member of the International Panel on the Regulation of Autonomous Weapons, and founder and former director of the Open Roboethics Institute.

Kristen Thomasen is a leading expert in robotics law and policy and an assistant professor at the Peter A. Allard School of Law at UBC.

Specializing in drone regulation and the privacy impacts of robotic technologies and artificial intelligence, Thomasen’s research is focused on the ways automation and robotic technologies in public spaces affect equity, accessibility, and privacy, and how automation and surveillance can introduce privatization into the public sphere. She is a regular public commentator in the media and serves on the Legal Expertise Committee of the Foundation for Responsible Robotics, as well as the International Committee for Robot Arms Control. Thomasen earned her JD degree at the University of Ottawa and completed her PhD in Law at the University of Ottawa. Prior to beginning her doctoral studies, she served as law clerk to the Honourable Madam Justice Rosalie Abella at the Supreme Court of Canada.

Heather Suzanne Woods is a scholar and researcher of digital rhetoric and the author of Make America Meme Again: The Rhetoric of the Alt-Right with Leslie Hahner. She is Assistant Professor and Director of Graduate Studies of Communication Studies at Kansas State University. 

Dr. Woods’s areas of expertise include memes, virtual assistants Siri and Alexa, online activism and social media, and smart homes. Her research on emerging tech provides crucial and actionable insight for scholars, industry, non-profits, and advocacy organizations. As a leader, she empowers communities in higher ed to build resilient, adaptive, inclusive processes and structures in preparation for a changing technological future. Dr. Woods’s work has been featured in Wired, The New York Times, Atlantic, CBC’s Spark, The Washington Post, The LA Times, and more. She is a K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award recipient, a HERS Leadership Institute alumna, and a senior advisor for the Women’s March.