2023 Cohort

Those fellows selected from the 2023 application for fellowships.

Julia Brown

Affiliated Faculty
UC San Francisco Humanities & Social Sciences in the School of Medicine
Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public

Dr. Julia Brown is an anthropologist and bioethicist who examines lived experiences and social value-making around controversial biotechnologies. She is currently exploring the ethics of prenatal gene technologies, including the emergence of prenatal gene editing. She is author of The Clozapine Clinic: Health Agency in High-Risk conditions (Routledge 2022).

Dr. Brown was one of the Kavli Center's inaugural Postdoctoral Fellows where she workshopped her research findings on the complex intersection between scientific, clinical, patient, and societal values. This included designing...

Cristina Ceballos

Postdoctoral Fellow
Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public

Cristina Ceballos studies artificial intelligence ethics and regulation, with a focus on government agencies and how they address questions of privacy and algorithmic bias. She has published on disparate impact in the administrative state (in the Yale Law Journal) and about Customs and Border Protection and its use of face recognition technology. During law school, she worked at the American Civil Liberties Union in the Immigrants’ Rights Project. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Kavli Center, Cristina will push forward on two main lines of research: first, examining how government agencies...

Juliana Chase

Graduate Fellow
Department of Psychology
Juliana Chase is currently a 5th year PhD student in Behavioral & Systems Neuroscience at UC Berkeley. Juliana’s dissertation work employs experimental and computational techniques to better understand neural circuit differences in mouse models of autism. Throughout her PhD, Juliana has been interested in what happens when science leaves the lab and has been engaged with science policy and outreach organizations on campus. As a fellow, Juliana hopes to build on her experience as an organizer and science communicator to explore how scientists can partner with affected communities...

Georgina Curto

Former Visiting Scholar
Technology Ethics Center, University of Notre Dame

Georgina Curto conducts interdisciplinary research on artificial intelligence to advance the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). She works closely with NGOs and government officials to provide new insights for local and global challenges, while contributing to the AI state of the art. She was awarded, together with the article co-authors, Best AI for Good Project in the last International Joint Conference on AI (IJCAI’22) for the work on AI simulations and poverty reduction policy making. She has also published on the use of machine learning (NLP) to generate indexes on...

Nicholas Karavolias

Former Graduate, then Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Plant & Microbial Biology
Innovative Genomics Institute

Nicholas Karavolias, PhD, was among the Kavli Center's first graduate student Fellows. Upon finishing his PhD in the Plant and Microbial Biology Department, he transitioned to a postdoctoral position in Brian Staskawicz's lab while continuing his work with the Kavli Center as a Postdoctoral Fellow. Broadly, Nicholas's research focuses on the applications of gene editing in agriculture focusing on climate change adaptation. In the lab, he uses CRISPR/Cas9 to understand the development of stomata in rice for improved drought resilience. Nicholas has experience teaching about gene...

Leana King

Graduate Fellow
Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute
From the very start, the development of the human brain is coordinated by highly specialized gene expression patterns that continue to change not only in prenatal, childhood, or adolescent stages, but also well into adulthood. Leana King's thesis work in the Cognitive Neuroanatomy Lab (P.I. Kevin Weiner) aims to examine this dynamic relationship between gene expression and brain development. As a 4th year PhD student, King's interest in the field of genetics has also grown. From starting out in perceptual and computational neuroscience to now relating development and neuroanatomy to...

Adriano Mannino

Postdoctoral Fellow
Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public

Adriano Mannino's research interests are in normative ethics, decision theory, political theory, and applied ethics, especially AI ethics and policy. His Ph.D. dissertation, "Playing Dice with Lives: An Essay on Aggregation, Rights, and Automation," examines the moral "numbers problem" through the lenses of moral philosophy, decision theory, and social choice. In other academic and practical work (as a social entrepreneur and policy consultant), Mannino has dealt with issues including climate change and collective action, animal ethics and politics, public health and medical resource...

Michal Masny

Former Postdoctoral Fellow
Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public

Michal Masny, PhD, is a philosopher with research interests in normative ethics, political philosophy, bioethics, and technology ethics. His doctoral work addressed the moral significance of the past, the nature of well-being, and the long-term future of humanity.

At the Kavli Center, Michal examined the impact of technology on human well-being. His current research focuses on: first, developments in geroscience that have the potential to significantly increase our lifespans and second, developments in artificial intelligence and robotics that could render humans obsolete in...

José Manuel Muñoz Ortega

Former Postdoctoral Fellow
Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public

José Muñoz, PhD, is a philosopher and biologist interested in the ethical implications of neurotechnology. He was a research fellow in radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and a research fellow in neuroethics at the University of Navarra and the International Center for Neuroscience and Ethics (CINET) in Spain. He was also an assistant professor of psychology at the European University of Valencia, in Spain, and a visiting researcher at the National Institute of Criminal Sciences (INACIPE) in Mexico. His project at the Kavli Center was intended to...

Matthew Norstad

Former Graduate Fellow
School of Public Health
Matthew Norstad, MPH, joined the Kavli Center during his last semester in the Masters of Public Health, Health Policy & Management degree program at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. With an academic and professional background in bioethics, health policy, and genomics, Norstad is particularly interested in the social and economic consequences of new gene editing therapies. These new technologies offer the first opportunity for the treatment of debilitating genetic conditions but have entered the market with record-breaking prices, putting them out of reach of many patients...