Our Speakers

Key Note Speaker: Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell is currently serving as the Chancellor of the University of Dundee and travels the world to speak about her experiences in astronomy. During her doctoral studies, she discovered pulsars, soon realized to be exotic neutron stars. This discovery ushered in the formation of countless sub-fields of astronomy, almost innumerable projects, and led to incomparable new knowledge of the universe . Her discovery is also fundamentally tied to the majority of the astronomy research done at WVU, as a large portion of our time is spent studying and using pulsars to discover new, innovative ways to explore the universe.

Dr. Maura McLaughlin

Dr. McLaughlin is a professor and researcher at West Virginia University. Dr. McLaughlin is co-founder of the Pulsar Search Collaboratory (PSC), a nation-wide program that gets middle and high school students involved in pulsar astronomy. She is also Co-Director of the NANOGrav Physics Frontiers Center, a collection of scientists working to use pulsars to detect gravitational waves. Dr. McLaughlin has recently been named one of Nature’s Top Ten People to Watch in 2019.

Dr. Kathryn Williamson

Dr. Kathryn Williamson is a professor and researcher at West Virginia University whose work focuses on astronomy outreach and education. She has transformed the way outreach is done in West Virginia schools and works diligently to teach others not only about the universe, but also how to share their passion with others.

Claudia Flores-Saviaga

Claudia Flores-Saviaga is a Fellow at Facebook Research and at the Oxford Internet Institute. She is also a Ph.D. student in the HCI Lab at West Virginia University. Her research involves the areas of AI, Crowdsourcing and Social Computing. She is interested in understanding how “bad actors” organize misinformation and propaganda messages, and how other citizens organize to debunk those manipulative campaigns. She uses this knowledge to then design intelligent systems that can fight disinformation at scale. She started her exploration of online spaces analyzing how political trolls were organizing during the 2016 US presidential elections. She developed novel probabilistic graphical models to uncover how the most active political trolls drove people to action. Her research has been covered by the Associated Press and Newsweek. Her research has caught the attention and has initiated collaborations with different think tanks and organizations such as the Wikimedia Foundation, the National Democratic Institute and the Organization of American States. Previously, Claudia worked as a technology adviser to the Governor of the State of Veracruz in Mexico, and has provided technology advice to the presidency of Mexico. Claudia has a masters degree in Information Technology from Carnegie Mellon University

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