In order to support our mission to make technology as widely accessible and broadly equitable as possible, CUNY PIT Lab is proud to have convened our inaugural advisory board.

Brought together with the invaluable guidance of founding board chair Brendon Hawkins, these six individuals will aid in our aims of building workplace and learning pathways for students, fostering cross-sector collaboration across non-profit and civic tech organizations, and continuing to create community-engaged research initiatives.

Meet our advisory board:

• Brendon Hawkins (founding chair) is a social technologist and systems researcher focused on modeling emotion as measurable infrastructure. He is the founder of Studio Lab BH, a systems research lab currently developing computational frameworks for understanding how affect shapes human behavior, culture, and digital environments. His work spans AI/ML product development, data systems, and interdisciplinary research.

• Katie Bailey is Senior Director at HearstLab, where she works with founders, investors, and industry leaders to help scale startups addressing real-world challenges. Over the past decade, she has led initiatives spanning product, innovation, strategy, and business development across Hearst’s B2B software and venture businesses. A longtime advocate for technology as a force for positive impact, Katie is particularly interested in how technology, entrepreneurship, and human-centered design can improve outcomes for individuals and communities.

• Seon Britton is a student in the PhD sociology program at CUNY’s Graduate Center, where he studies community organizations. He is currently working on his dissertation which focuses on community technology centers and how they utilize technology for community development. His work employs an ethnographic approach to see how organizations work across fields in fighting for digital equity.

• Renata Gerecke serves as an AI Policymaker within New York City’s Office of Technology and Innovation (OTI), where they lead initiatives focused on algorithmic accountability, transparency and responsible AI adoption across city agencies. In this role, Renata oversees the city’s Algorithms Management and Reporting framework and contributes to policy guidance shaping how AI and automated decision systems are evaluated and deployed in public operations.

• Ruby Justice Thelot is a designer, artist & cyberethnographer based in new york city. He is a professor of design and media studies at NYU. His work focuses on digital phenomenology, virtual ontology and the implications of being-on-line. He writes about virtual realms, digital communities, and artificial intelligence. His work and research have been presented and published in journals, magazines, and conferences all over the world. He is the author of the books “A Cyberarchaeology of Checkpoints” and “A Few Essays of Taste” (Metalabel’s 2025 zine of the year). He is the founder of 13101401 inc,  a design and research studio.

• Renée Westmoreland is a digital and UX leader for the social sector. Her career is focused on creating digital experiences for mission-driven audiences — work centered on transforming complexity into clarity, turning data and information into elegant, intuitive experiences that people can easily navigate and trust. As Senior Director of UX at Candid, Renée managed user experience for SaaS platforms and digital resources, and led the design process for unifying multiple legacy platforms into a single product serving millions of nonprofit professionals, as well as the development of digital solutions providing news and education to the social sector.

We will be highlighting each of our advisory board members on our blog beginning next week – make sure to return to our website to read more.

Presently, the CUNY Public Interest Technology Lab is continuing to grow in capacity and expand opportunities for students, faculty, and community partners. We’re thrilled to announce the appointment of two new Associate Directors to help us advance our vision. Effective immediately, we are welcoming Raj Korpan (Assistant Professor, Computer Science, Hunter College) as Associate Director of Research and Community Engagement, and Nate Cooper (Lecturer, UX Design Concentration, Kingsborough Community College) as Associate Director of PIT Workforce Development and Experiential Learning.

This summer, Raj will lead the development of public-facing critical AI workshops with CUNY students teams at the NYC PIT Pop Up.  Nate will be collaborating with the PIT Lab on building a studio-lab course in Human-Centered Design for Public Interest Technology.

We spoke to Raj and Nate about these exciting developments in CUNY PIT Lab’s ability to execute its continuing mission of making technology equitable, sustainable, safe, and accessible to all.

Can you say a little bit about what you foresee for yourselves in your new Associate Director roles?

RAJ KORPAN: I’m really excited to have a closer formal relationship with the PIT lab. We’ve been working together in various degrees over the last year, but to have it formalized as an associate director position is great. My role is to spearhead some of the research that we want to do around public interest technology through community engagement. I think that there’s not a lot of research that has been done that explores how public-facing, community-engaged kinds of spaces improve the public’s awareness of technology, particularly of AI and robotics. And so we want to do some research on how we can run events, different types of engagement activities, workshops, and so on, that engage the community, engage the public, and hopefully teach them about AI, about robotics, about technology, development, while still centering this public interest lens.

NATE COOPER: The last ten, fifteen years of my work I’ve looked at education through the lens of what in CUNY they often call career connected learning. I have this background where I think education should help students get into meaningful careers and find pathways into opportunities for jobs and just getting the life that they want. Education helps unlock opportunities for people and it helps to get them where they need to be. In my professional life, I’ve been very invested in technology that is civically engaged, civic-minded, thinking about how it helps people. And I met Katie [Cumiskey, executive director of CUNY PIT Lab] through some of these circles around career-connected learning and the impact of AI on jobs and education. And so coming to CUNY PIT Lab, it just feels like it’s a natural fit for the kinds of stuff I find really rewarding about what CUNY is good at, which is: providing opportunities for students and thinking through the lens of job outcomes in a way that is connected to the community strongly. CUNY is New York City, you know?

Raj, how has your experience in the field of robotics given you insights into the future of AI and how AI can be developed ethically?

RK: Great question. My lab, the Trustworthy Intelligent, Explainable Robotics Lab (TIER Lab), we really focus on two big areas of research. One is more on systems and algorithms, a lot more of the technical AI and robotics research. And then the other side is more on the human interaction, human impact of these systems. My PhD was very much on the AI side, and we developed a system for robots to navigate and explore indoor spaces and environments and tried to build something that was able to kind of emulate human intelligence as it relates to navigation and wayfinding.

As I moved into a full-time faculty role, I went back to thinking about my goals and my values and what it is that I want to really focus on as a faculty member. And to me, it was really important to evolve my direction towards more kind of human-centered research, to really focus on: how do these systems actually impact people? How do we build systems for people in our communities? So that was where I came to, and then I started kind of branching out further to think about communities interacting with these kinds of systems. And that’s where I think a lot of the research on public interest tech, AI literacy, data literacy [is going]: how do we use these systems to actually support specific communities?

Nate, you’ve described your work with CUNY PIT Lab as an effort to help “shape the digital infrastructure of public life.” How does your experience in UX inform your approach to that problem?

NC: Human-centered design really is just problem solving, putting the user first. So, I might understand a problem from the perspective of how I see that problem, but it’s not going to be solved if [we] don’t understand who I’m solving that problem for, or how they are affected. And that includes being aware of biases and all kinds of constraints, like accessibility and things like that. But if you’re only looking at things in little chunks of isolation, there’s this bigger institutional challenge where it’s like, okay, well, we can build a really great tax portal, but then, for example, the food benefits portal doesn’t work with it, you know? They don’t talk to each other. So UX is about problem solving, understanding the problem. Design affects interfaces, it affects architecture, it affects processes and communication. So there’s all these different pieces. And if you’re only tackling those individually, you’re not really solving the bigger problems.

Sonic Spaces is a new series taking place at NYC PIT Pop Up exploring the mediums of sound and music, and looking into how they inform our ideas around community, communication, and commodification.

All of these events are free and open to the public.

On Sunday April 19th at 2pm, Aurelie Barbier (Space to the People) will be presenting Sounds of Earth, a transatlantic experiment in which Berlin-based opera singer Lola Volonakis performs live in dialogue with her AI double in New York. Using high-resolution vocal modeling, the performance uses AI to reinterpret fragments of Mozart’s The Magic Flute (one of the musical selections NASA sent to represent humanity in 1977), challenging notions of authorship, replication, and cultural heritage. This performance will be followed by a Q&A and discussion with Barbier, Volonakis, and Camille JeanJean (Villa Albertine). The event will allow for a limited in-person capacity and will be livestreamed. RSVP here to attend.

On Monday April 20th at 6pm, writer/educator/DJ Todd Craig will be in dialogue with Chenjerai Kumanyika to celebrate the audiobook release of his recent book K for the Way. Craig’s book establishes and investigates the function of DJ rhetoric and literacy, illuminating the DJ as a fruitful example for (re)envisioning approaches to writing, research, and analysis in contemporary educational settings. Because it is widely recognized that the DJ was the catalyst for the creation of Hip Hop culture, this book begins a new conversation in which Hip Hop DJs introduce ideas about poetics and language formation through the modes, practices, and techniques they engage in on a daily basis. The event will allow for a limited in-person capacity and will be livestreamed. RSVP here to attend.

On Wednesday April 22nd, author Liz Pelly will be joined by moderator Jeff Tobias to discuss her recent book Mood Machine, which takes a critical look at the rise of Spotify, the data surveillance company masquerading as a music streaming platform. Drawing on over one hundred interviews with industry insiders, former Spotify employees, and musicians, Mood Machine takes us to the inner workings of today’s highly consolidated record business, showing what has changed as music has become increasingly playlisted, personalized, and autoplayed. The event will allow for a limited in-person capacity and will be livestreamed. RSVP here to attend.

On Friday April 24th, artists Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere will host a day-length audio installation at the pop up that will capture and recontextualize radio frequencies from areas inside and immediately surrounding the Oculus. The local airwaves will be sourced and recombined into a sound piece exploring the overlapping textures communicated across Lower Manhattan re-articulating the invisible and omnipresent frequencies used by municipal agencies.

Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere are interdisciplinary artists whose practice spans over twenty years of projects that actuate music and sound, radio, dissent, and the cultural complexities of the public sphere. The artists have produced works in video installation, lyric writing, performance, and photography. Their research interests lie in the intersection between music, civic action, and historical moments that resonate through distinct musical instrumentation and sonorous traditions. This installation will be freely accessible to visitors at the pop up from 12pm-6pm throughout the day, no RSVP necessary.