Meet the Inaugural Atlanta Academy on Science and Innovation Policy Cohort

The Inaugural Cohort

Blurb / Gallery Set

Soheil Ahmadi

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Soheil Ahmadi is an MBA graduate and a Ph.D. in Business Administration (Management) candidate at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Canada.

Clara Boothby

Clara Boothby standing outside, with houses' rooftops in the background.

Clara Boothby is a doctoral student at Indiana University, Bloomington preparing to defend her dissertation in 2022.

Christian Chacua

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Christian Chacua is currently a Ph.D. candidate in economics of innovation at the University of Bordeaux in Bordeaux, France and a growth lab associate at the Center for International Development - Harvard University.

Christophe Combemale

Headshot of Chistophe Combemale sitting in an office.

Christophe Combemale is a doctoral student in Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, preparing to defend his dissertation in Spring 2022.

Nina Fárová

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Nina Fárová holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, Czech Republic. She works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Gender and Science, Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences.

Ashlee Frandell

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Ashlee Frandell is a doctoral student in public administration and public policy at the School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona.

Yang Gao

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Yang Gao is a fourth-year doctoral candidate at the Department of International Business at HEC Montreal in Montreal, Canada.

Myriam Grégoire-Zawilski

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Myriam Grégoire-Zawilski is a Ph.D. student in Public Administration at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York.

Johanna Kalliokoski

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Johanna Kalliokoski is a doctoral student and project researcher at the School of Management of the University of Vaasa in Vaasa, Finland.

Shaleen Khanal

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Shaleen Khanal is currently a Fox Fellow at Yale University and a Ph.D. candidate in the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at National University of Singapore in Queenstown, Singapore.

Justina Onumah

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Justina Onumah, an agricultural development economist is a senior research scientist at the Science and Technology Policy Research Institute (STEPRI) of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in Ghana, and a doctoral fellow at the University of Ghana in Accra, Ghana.

Marco Otoya

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Marco Otoya is a second-year Ph.D. student studying economy: instruments of economics analysis at the University of Cantabria, Spain.

Gerard Ralphs

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Gerard Ralphs is a doctoral student in public management and governance at South Africa's University of Johannesburg, working under the DSI/NRF/Newton Fund Trilateral Chair in Transformative Innovation, 4IR and Sustainable Development, and in collaboration with the School of Culture and Society - Department of Archeology and Heritage Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark.

Jack Reid

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Jack Reid is a doctoral student in the Space Enabled group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, though he has been at MIT for a few prior joining the group.

Inna Smirnova

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Inna Smirnova is a postdoctoral research fellow at the School of Information at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She received her PhD in Strategic Management from the University of Vienna, Austria.

Robert Ward

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Robert is a doctoral student in public policy and a master's student in computer science at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia. He is also a visiting student with Marc Santolini in the Interaction Data Lab at the INSERM-University of Paris.

Caroline Wesson

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Caroline Wesson is a fourth year Ph.D. student studying political science at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, where she is a President’s Scholar and a graduate research assistant. She also holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in international affairs from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Liza Wood

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Liza Wood is an environmental social scientist, earning her Ph.D. at the University of California, Davis in ecology with an emphasis in computational social science.

Yuan Yuan

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Yuan Yuan is a doctoral student in the Strategy and International Business group at the University of Warwick in Coventry, England, working with Professor Giuliana Battisti and Professor Stephen Roper.

Sam Zhang

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Sam Zhang is a Ph.D. student and NSF Graduate Research Fellow in Science Policy in the Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, working with Professor Aaron Clauset.