Belfer Fellows

In 2018, ADL Center for Technology and Society (CTS), with the support of the Robert Belfer Family, launched the Belfer Fellows program. This fourth class of Belfer fellows includes two outstanding individuals that will develop projects with CTS to study generative AI and other emerging technologies. The Belfer Fellowship program advances ADL’s work by supporting groundbreaking research into online hate and harassment and implementing these projects to fight for just, equitable online spaces.

The two 2023 fellows are:

Dr. Deb Donig

Dr. Deb Donig is an Assistant Professor of English Literature at Cal Poly and a Lecturer UC Berkeley’s School of Information in the MA in Data Science Program. As an in-house fellow, Dr. Donig will work alongside the CTS team in developing research and viewpoints on the potential harms–as well as opportunities–of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) on hate, harassment and extremism. Her work with CTS will consider how GAI may be used to generate and spread hateful and extremist ideologies, as well as how GAI models may be used to measure, detect, and avert the proliferation of GAI-created extremist content. Dr. Donig is the co-founder of the Cal Poly Ethical Technology Initiative and the host of “Technically Human,” a podcast where she talks with major thinkers, writers, and industry-leading technologists about the relationship between humans and the technologies we create. She is the interim co-Director for the Center for Expressive Technologies and a Fellow at the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. She has taught and published on a wide variety of areas, including ethical technology, comparative genocide studies, science fiction, African and Caribbean literatures, and The New Yorker. In 2020, Professor Donig served on the Biden/Harris Policy Strategy Team in Higher Education. As a policy expert, she drafted policy memos for and advised the campaign’s First 100 Day priority strategy for the Administration.

Dr. Swapneel Mehta

Dr. Swapneel Mehta is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Questrom School of Business at Boston University and Research Affiliate at MIT Sloan School of Business. He is a Google Research Innovator and received his Ph.D. at NYU Data Science and CSMAP researching methods to limit online disinformation on social networks using techniques from machine learning and causal inference. He is interested in improving measurement methodology to identify the effects of interventions, and in deploying auditing tools for online harms in order to improve platform governance. He conducted research with Oxford and Meta, previously interned with Slack, Twitter, Adobe, and worked on machine learning for particle physics at CERN. He founded a research collective called SimPPL to create open-access trust and safety tools working with student communities in the global south. They have worked with The Sunday Times, Deutsche Welle, and others, and have won grants and awards from Google Research, Google Cloud, Amazon AWS, the Wikimedia Foundation, the Goethe Institute, and the NYC Media Lab.

Previous Belfer Fellows

2022 Belfer Fellows
2021 Belfer Fellows
2020 Belfer Fellows
2019 Belfer Fellows
2018 Belfer Fellows