Speakers

Caroline Criado Perez

Author, Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

Caroline Criado Perez is a best-selling and award-winning writer, broadcaster and award-winning feminist campaigner. Her #1 Sunday Times best-selling second book, Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, was published in March 2019 by Chatto & Windus in the UK & Abrams in the US. It has so far spent 20 weeks in the Sunday Times bestseller lists, is being translated into twenty-four languages, and is the winner of the 2019 Royal Society Science Book Prize, the 2019 Books Are My Bag Readers Choice Award, and the 2019 Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award. Caroline was the 2013 recipient of the Liberty Human Rights Campaigner of the Year award, and was named OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours 2015. In 2020 she was the recipient of Finland's HÄN award for promoting equality. She is currently working on a follow-up to Invisible Women, called Now You See Us: How to Close the Gender Data Gap and Design a World That Works for Everyone.

Image by Rachel Louise Brown

Aleszu Bajak

Graduate Programs Manager, Northeastern University School of Journalism

Aleszu Bajak is a science and data journalist who teaches courses and manages the graduate programs at Northeastern University's School of Journalism. He is a former Knight Science Journalism Fellow at M.I.T. and Science Friday radio producer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Undark, The Washington Post, M.I.T. Technology Review and Nature. At Northeastern, he is innovation lead for the Co-Laboratory for Data Impact, a faculty affiliate with the Global Resilience Institute and an affiliate of the NU Lab for Texts, Maps, and Networks.

John Sall

Co-Founder and Executive Vice President, SAS

John Sall is co-founder and Executive Vice President of SAS, the world’s leading business analytics software vendor. He heads the JMP business division, which creates interactive and highly visual statistical discovery software designed for scientists and engineers. Sall remains the primary architect of JMP® software.

Sall is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society. Reflecting his strong interest in international conservation and environmental issues, he serves on the board of the World Wildlife Fund and on the advisory board of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. He is a former member of the North Carolina State University Board of Trustees.

Andrew Ba Tran

Data Reporter, The Washington Post

Andrew Ba Tran is a data reporter on the rapid-response investigative team at the Washington Post, and has analyzed how COVID-19 has disparately impacted certain communities, the spread of opioids across the country, and the rise of right-wing violence. He shared in winning the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting in 2018 for the coverage of candidate Roy Moore's alleged past sexual harassment of teenage girls and subsequent efforts to undermine the journalism that exposed it. Andrew was a data editor at The Connecticut Mirror's TrendCT.org. Prior to that, he was a data producer at The Boston Globe, and he's worked in newsrooms of The Virginian-Pilot and the Sun-Sentinel. He’s a graduate of the University of Texas and teaches quantitative methods at American University. Andrew is an advocate for open data and reproducible research.

Shankar Vedantam

Social Science Correspondent, NPR and host of the Hidden Brain podcast

Shankar Vedantam is NPR's social science correspondent and the host of Hidden Brain. The focus of his reporting is on human behavior and the social sciences, and how research in those fields can get listeners to think about the news in unusual and interesting ways. Hidden Brain is among the most popular podcasts in the world, with over two million downloads per week. The Hidden Brain radio show is featured on some 250 public radio stations across the United States. Vedantam spent 10 years as a reporter at The Washington Post and wrote the Post’s Department of Human Behavior column for two years. From 2009 to 2010, he served as a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Vedantam is the author of the non-fiction book The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars and Save Our Lives. The book, published in 2010, describes how unconscious biases influence people. He has served as a part-time lecturer at Harvard University and Columbia University. He has also served as a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington.