Directory

Rediet Abebe

Assistant Professor, Computer Science, UC Berkeley Co-founder, Mechanism Design for Social Good (MD4SG) Co-founder, Black in AI

Rediet Abebe is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Junior Fellow (2019-22) at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Abebe holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Cornell University and graduate degrees in mathematics from Harvard University and the University of Cambridge.

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Galen Mancino

CLEAN Software Engineer

Since 2018, Galen Mancino has contributed to and helped maintain the open-source knowledge-graph geospatial software known as the Arches Project. He is strongly interested in the intersection of Law, Government, and Technology and how we can collectively maintain and expand our digital commons in service of the non-digital commons.

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The Berkeley Institute for Data Science team includes developers, faculty, postdoctoral scholars, researchers, and administrative staff. BIDS has an active and diverse community of interdisciplinary experts from life, social, & physical sciences, the humanities, computer science, statistics, and applied mathematics.

Ayyub Ibrahim

CLEAN AI Engineer

Ayyub Ibrahim is a data scientist and a member of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science's CLEAN police project, where he uses AI and machine learning to process unstructured data. Ayyub joins BIDS from the Innocence Project New Orleans, where as the Director of Research he built ML tools for community organizations, innocence organizations, and public defender offices. Ayyub is also the founder of Machine Learning Justice Lab, a startup that develops AI tools for legal and human rights defense communities.

Kirstie Whitaker

BIDS Executive Director

Dr Kirstie Whitaker is a passionate advocate for making science "open for all" by promoting equity and inclusion for people from diverse backgrounds. She joined BIDS as Executive Director in January 2025. Kirstie holds a BSc in Physics from the University of Bristol and an MSc in Medical Physics from the University of British Columbia, supported by a Commonwealth Fellowship. She completed her PhD at the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at UC Berkeley in 2012, where she held a Fulbright Scholarship. Kirstie was a...

Maryam Vareth

BIDS Chief Health Technology Officer
College of Computing, Data Science, and Society
Managing Director, Agile Metabolic Health, College of Computing, Data Science and Society (CDSS) Founding Director, Innovate For Health Initiative Principal Investigator, UC Berkeley Affiliated Researcher, Center for Intelligent Imaging (Ci2), UCSF

Dr. Maryam Vareth is the Chief Health Technology Officer at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) and Managing Director of the Agile Metabolic Health at UC Berkeley’s College of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS). With a career spanning over 15 years at the...

Adrian Hill

Assistant Dean, Interdisciplinary Initiatives
College of Computing, Data Science, and Society

Adrian Hill is assistant dean for interdisciplinary initiatives in the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society. She joined CDSS with more than 15 years’ experience working to support academic research, most recently in the Office of the Executive Vice President for Research at Columbia University. In that role, she worked to bolster cross-campus research themes, including climate and precision medicine. She partnered with faculty leadership to develop the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute and strengthen its ties with academic departments across the university. She...

Tim Thomas

Research Training Lead, Berkeley Computational Social Science Training Program
Urban Displacement Project, UC Berkeley

Tim Thomas is a professional researcher and research director at Berkeley’s Urban Displacement Project (UDP) specializing in urban sociology, demography, and data science. His research focuses on how neighborhood change, housing disparities, policies, and displacement affects household socioeconomic stratification and mobility by race and gender in the United States. His research at the UDP centers on developing open-source tools to measure displacement and gentrification as well as a national housing precarity risk model...

George Obaido

BIDS-CHAI Data Science Research Scholar (Education)

George Obaido is a Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) - Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence (CHAI) Research Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, working with BIDS Faculty Affiliate Rediet Abebe, an assistant professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley. Obaido completed his PhD in Computer Science at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. His research...

Meryem Essaidi

BIDS-Accenture Data Science Research Scholar (Responsible AI)

As a BIDS-Accenture Data Science Research Scholar focusing on responsible AI, Meryem Essaidi will be working with UC Berkeley professors Rediet Abebe (EECS) and Tolani Britton (School of Education). She is currently completing a PhD in Computer Science at Princeton University, and previously completed a dual MSE and BSE in computer science at UPenn. Her research is in the areas of algorithms, algorithmic game theory,...