People

Faculty Fellows Grant Recipients Student Research Assistants Karsh Support

Faculty

Faculty Co-Lead

Jess Reia

Faculty Affiliate

Madhav Marathe

Affiliations

Executive Director, Biocomplexity Institute
Distinguished Professor of Biocomplexity
Professor of Computer Science

Bio

Madhav Marathe is an endowed distinguished professor of biocomplexity, executive director of the Biocomplexity Institute, and a tenured professor of computer science at the University of Virginia. Marathe is a passionate advocate and practitioner of transdisciplinary team science. During his thirty year professional career, he has established and led many large transdisciplinary projects and groups. His areas of expertise include digital twins, network science, artificial intelligence, multi-agent systems, high-performance computing, computational epidemiology, biological and socially coupled systems, and data analytics.

His prior positions include professor of computer science and director of the Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory within the Biocomplexity Institute of Virginia Tech and a team leader of research and computing in the Basic and Applied Simulation Science Group, Computer and Computational Sciences Division at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, Association for Computing Machinery, and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Marathe has published more than 500 articles in peer-reviewed journals, conferences, and workshops. Mentoring and training next-generation scientists has been his lifelong passion. He has mentored more than a dozen staff scientists, and (co)-advised more than thirty doctoral students, twenty MS students, and fifteen postdoctoral fellows.

Marathe and his team focus on developing the scientific foundations and the associated engineering principles to study large-scale biological, information, social, and technical (BIST) systems. His current interests span five broad themes: (i) methods to construct various BIST networks using partial and noisy data as well as procedural information; (ii) understanding the general form and structure of dynamical processes over BIST networks (e.g., key network/pathway properties and typical pathways that impact dynamics); (iii) algorithmic theory of optimization and control as it pertains to the dynamical processes, including methods to detect, enhance, arrest, and mitigate dynamics; (iv) general conceptual and algorithmic foundations to understand the co-evolution of the networks and dynamics; and (v) high-performance services-based computing solutions that can be delivered seamlessly to end users and policymakers.

Fellows

2024-25 Fellow in Journalism

Khari Johnson

Affiliations

Technology Reporter, CalMatters

Bio

Khari Johnson works at The Markup, which is part of CalMatters, where he focuses on writing human stories about tech in the public interest, the first tech reporter in the history of the nonprofit newsroom. He was a practitioner fellow in the Digital Technology for Democracy Lab at the University of Virginia during the 2024-25 academic year, and is currently a guest speaker at the Pulitzer Center, a member of the Society of Professional Journalists, and an advisor to the Co-Opting AI book series.

He previously worked as a senior staff writer at WIRED where he told stories at the intersection of tech, policy, and power, often focusing on how artificial intelligence can harm humans, accelerate inequality, violate human rights, and threaten society, but also stories about space law or plans to melt the moon to get to Mars because it’s important to make space to dream.

He’s talked about how people can defend themselves and their communities from AI with NPR, The Beat with Ari Melber on MSNBC, onstage at WIRED’s 30th anniversary, and at the Democracy Summit at Howard University. He’s also enjoyed speaking with civil society groups like the World Economic Forum and James Irvine Foundation and students at Northwestern University, the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, San Francisco State University, and McGill University as part of the Feminist Publishing and Tech Speaker Series.

Khari previously worked for publications like VentureBeat, AOL’s Patch, Business 2.0 Magazine, and San Diego News Network, with contributions to publications like Real Future (now part of Univision), the San Francisco Chronicle, and Voice of San Diego.

In 2016, Khari was the first hire at VentureBeat to create the AI Channel, a small reporting team that explored the ways technology is being integrated into business, society, and the lives of individuals. While there he wrote the AI Weekly, a look at issues in the artificial intelligence zeitgeist.

Prior to that, Khari helped develop the first editorial products for NewCo Shift including a daily newsletter for startups interested in purpose and profit.

As a Patch editor from 2010 to 2014 he built a relationship with members of the community in Imperial Beach, California while assigning, editing, and reporting stories ranging from crime to politics to breaking news. He also wrote the Your Town column to explain city council meeting agendas in plain English ahead of time in order to make local government more accessible and empower local residents.

In 2014, Khari created Through the Cracks, a project to explore how journalists and documentary makers use crowdfunding to support independent works. Best practices and insights unearthed by a team of 10 were cited or republished by the Reynolds Journalism Institute, Nieman Reports, Columbia Journalism Review, Knight Digital Media Center, MediaShift, American Journalism Review, Global Investigative Journalism Network, and Nonprofit Quarterly, among others.

Khari has reported bylines from California, Colorado Springs, and South Florida as well as Mexico, Holland, Denmark, Italy, France, and Turkey. He’s a member of Bay Area Storytellers of Color (BASC) and the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ).

Grant Recipients

DTD Lab Seed Grant Recipient

Andrea Roberts

Affiliation

Associate Professor, Urban + Environmental Planning
Director, Center for Cultural Landscapes

Bio

Dr. Andrea Roberts is an advocate, educator, and scholar of Black placemaking histories and practices in the Americas, and a descendant of the founders of historic Black settlements in Texas. Her 12 years of professional experience in housing, government, and advocacy inform her scholarly efforts to bring marginalized, historic Black communities to the center of planning practice and research. She is an Associate Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning at the University of Virginia, where she also serves as Faculty Director of the Center for Cultural Landscapes (CCL) and is an affiliate faculty member of the Department of Architectural History. She is also the owner of the consultancy, Freedom Colonies Project, LLC, through which she provides creative research design for civic art & landscape design projects, coaches emerging preservationists, and gives keynote lectures. Her peer-reviewed and public scholarship on Black placemaking and placekeeping frame these concepts as part of a long tradition of resistance and freedom-seeking in the Americas. She’s published in The Journal of Planning History, Buildings and Landscapes, the Journal of the American Planning Association, the Journal of Community Archaeology and Heritage, Planning Theory & Practice, and Environmental Justice. She has received awards for her engaged scholarship from The Vernacular Architecture Forum and the Urban Affairs Association.

She created The Texas Freedom Colonies Project Atlas and Grassroots Preservation Study in 2014 to identify and map disappearing settlements and their historic properties through participatory heritage conservation and community storytelling. The Project has become a vehicle through which students, advocates, and volunteers record locations and stories about 533 Black settlements in the state. Under the auspices of the CCL, she now leads the Mellon Foundation-supported Outsider Preservation Initiative, which will expand The Project beyond Texas to support projects in Louisiana, Virginia, California, and Canada. She is currently authoring a book, Never Sell the Land: Place Persistence as Resistance, about her experiences recording place origin stories and grassroots Black preservation practices that sustain cultural resilience, which has been accepted for publication by The University of Texas Press.

Planners and researchers throughout the US have applied her approaches to challenge the invisibility of Black settlements and to promote recognition. She has received awards and fellowships for her engaged research methods and scholarship and serves on various boards and research teams. Dr. Roberts was Co-Project Director for the 2022 and 2024 NEH Summer Institutes for Higher Education Faculty—"Towards a People's History of Landscape: Black & Indigenous Histories.” Dr. Roberts serves on PolicyLink’s Spatial Futures Fellowship Advisory Committee and the Urban Landscape Studies Advisory Board at Dumbarton Oaks and is a steering committee member for the Black Experiences with Planning in Canada partnership and research study. Dr. Roberts is an advisory council member of the Oatlands National Trust for Historic Preservation Site. She supports the Aya Symposium, an annual Texas Freedom Colonies conference created for and by descendants.

Dr. Roberts holds a Ph.D. in Community and Regional Planning from the University of Texas at Austin (2016), an M.A. in Government Administration and Public Finance from the University of Pennsylvania (2006), and a B.A. in Political Science from Vassar College (1996).

Student Research Assistants

Karsh Institute of Democracy Support

Join our vibrant team and help us explore democracy in the digital age.

Current Opportunities

People

Faculty

Lauren Bridges

Steven L. Johnson

Mona Kasra

Andrew Mondschein

David Nemer

Jess Reia

Mona Sloane

Chirag Agarwal

Madhav Marathe

Aynne Kokas

Bertrall Ross

Laurent Dubois

Fellows

Ahmed Alrawi

Yasmin Curzi

Aashka Dave

Maria Lungu

Ehsan Nouri

Andre Sobral

Nicole West Bassoff

Megan Wiessner

Jun Yuan

Weile (Wendy) Zhou

Khari Johnson

Grant Recipients

Andrea Roberts

Lana Swartz

Student Research Assistants

Celia Calhoun

Diego DiMattina

Ella Duus

Ryan Ermovick

Owen Kitzmann

Karsh Institute of Democracy Support

Maddie Donegan

Jane Kulow

Randy Richards

Amy Tackitt

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