Shehu is an accomplished administrator, teacher, and scholar. She currently serves as George Mason’s Inaugural VP and Chief AI Officer in which capacity she also continues to provide leadership for the Institute of Digital InnovAtion (IDIA) for which she served as Associate Vice President for Research during 2022 and 2024.

Shehu also serves as an Associate Dean for AI Innovation in the College of Engineering and Computing (CEC), where she is also a tenured Professor in the Department of Computer Science.

Source: CEC webpage

Thema (pron: Tay-mah) Monroe-White is an Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Innovation Policy in the Schar School of Policy and Government and Department of Computer Science (joint) at George Mason University. Her broad interests include bias mitigation in artificial intelligence (AI), critical quantitative and computational methods, and racial equity in innovation and entrepreneurship (I&E).

As an interdisciplinary scholar, her work explores the systemic biases that affect the workforce and educational journeys of racially minoritized groups within science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. She is particularly concerned with understanding the pathways to achieving social and economic empowerment for minoritized groups via I&E, AI literacy, and emancipatory data science.

Source: GMU page

Dasha Pruss is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Computer Science at George Mason University and a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

Previously, she was a 2023-2024 fellow at the Berkman Klein Center and a postdoctoral fellow in the Embedded EthiCS program at Harvard University. In 2023 she received her PhD in history & philosophy of science from the University of Pittsburgh, where she was a National Science Foundation fellow, and she holds a BS in computer science.

Dr. Pruss draws on interdisciplinary methods from critical data studies, feminist philosophy of science, and the qualitative social sciences to examine how AI systems shape (and are shaped by) their social contexts. Her research critically interrogates the social impacts of algorithmic decision-making systems promoted by ‘evidence-based’ reforms in the US criminal legal system.

In 2024, she organized Prediction and Punishment: Cross-Disciplinary Workshop on Carceral AI, which brought together scholars and activists from around the world to address technologies designed to police, incarcerate, surveil, and control human beings. Dr. Pruss is also an activist and has co-organized efforts to ban facial recognition and predictive policing in the city of Pittsburgh.

Source: Mason page

Dr. Wojtusiak, Professor of Health Informatics and Director of the Machine Learning and Inference Laboratory, has expertise that spans machine learning, health informatics, artificial intelligence in clinical decision support and knowledge discovery in medical data, and a wide range of applications of these fields in health care. His particular area of interest is in developing algorithms that derive simple, transparent and usable models from complex health data to predict patient and population outcomes. He studies how to create and evaluate reproducible, unbiased and trustworthy algorithms and models.

Dr. Wojtusiak serves as the Division Director for Health Informatics in the Department of Health Administration and Policy. He oversees undergraduate, master’s and doctoral programs in health informatics. Dr. Wojtusiak teaches several courses focused on machine learning, data mining, artificial intelligence and computing applied in medicine, healthcare and individual/population health.

He authored or co-authored over 100 research publications and presentations and continues to collaborate with multiple national and international institutions.

J.P. Singh is Distinguished University Professor at George Mason University (USA), and Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow with the Robert Bosch Academy, Berlin. He is also co-director of the Center for Advancing Human-Machine Partnership (CAHMP) at George Mason.

Singh has published 10 books and over 100 articles. His latest books are:  Cultural Values in Political Economy (2020), and Sweet Talk:  Paternalism and Collective Action in North-South Trade Negotiations (Stanford, 2017).

Source: Website

Alan R. Shark is an associate professor in the School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. His research focuses on technology leadership, artificial intelligence, emerging technologies, governance, cybersecurity, and civic engagement.

In addition to and formerly, he served 20 years as executive director of the Public Technology Institute (PTI).

Jesse Kirkpatrick is a Research Associate Professor, Acting Director of the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy,  and Co-director of the Mason Autonomy and Robotics Center (MARC) at George Mason University.

Jesse is also an International Security Fellow at New America and serves as a consultant for numerous organizations. His most recent consulting engagement is with Noblis Inc., a non-profit science, technology, and strategy organization that delivers technical and advisory solutions to federal government clients, where he is a member of the Responsible Artificial Intelligence Committee; AI Review Board; and Biosafety and Bioethics Committee.

A naval officer and military pilot from 1988-1999, Cummings was one of the U.S. Navy’s first female fighter pilots. She is now the director of Mason’s Autonomy and Robotics Center (MARC) and a professor at George Mason University. She holds faculty appointments in the Mechanical Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Computer Science departments. She is an American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Fellow and recently served as the senior safety advisor to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Cummings received her BS in Mathematics from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1988, her MS in Space Systems Engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School in 1994, and her PhD in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia in 2004.

Source: GMU webpage

👋 Hi, I’m Sai Sriram Uppada – a Data Analytics Engineering graduate, AWS Certified Data Engineer, and AI enthusiast who enjoys building end‑to‑end data, ML, and LLM‑powered systems that solve real problems in a scalable way.

I recently completed my Master’s in Data Analytics Engineering at George Mason University (GPA 3.85/4.0), where I focused on data engineering, machine learning, and LLM-based analytics. Over the past few years, through academic projects, research work, and internships, I’ve worked across the full data lifecycle: from ingestion and ETL to modeling, evaluation, and deployment for analytics and intelligent applications. I’m actively seeking full-time and internship opportunities as a Data Engineer, Data Analytics Engineer, or Data Analyst where I can contribute to data platforms, AI-driven products, and cloud-native solutions.