Eight School of Information students have been awarded fellowships for 2025-26. From research on food waste, industry asset emissions, and platform risk for marginalized youth, these scholars are pushing the boundaries of cybersecurity, data science, and information science. These fellowships will support student endeavors to better digital information technologies, mitigate climate change, further lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and/or queer studies, promote cybersecurity, and use data science for good.
Congratulations to our fellowship winners, and thank you to the generous donors whose support makes these awards possible.
Steven Weber Futures Fellowship
Yangyang Yang
Ph.D. student Yangyang Yang has extensively researched how technologically mediated design elements can de-center humans and spark an appreciation for environmental or non-human entities in their participants. Her project, “Being The Creek,” utilizes mobile augmented reality (MAR) to help people experience Berkeley’s natural environment and its history from the perspective of Strawberry Creek. Participants are exposed to auditory, olfactory, and tactile stimuli that help them connect more deeply with the environment, promoting a reevaluation of humans’ impact on the environment and their relationship with the local ecosystem.
Yang intends to transform “Being the Creek” into a public experience by collaborating with local Indigenous communities and environmental organizations, rebuilding the tech, and organizing outreach efforts to study how participating in a group can affect the experience of similar experiments.
“As ‘Being the Creek’ becomes more widely accessible, I hope to further study how shifts in perspective may influence how future leaders make decisions in their respective fields,” Yang said. “If one begins to see environmental nonhumans as agentic beings rather than mere resources, might a policymaker consider a river a stakeholder, or an architect view a native tree as a co-resident?”
Quigley/Heffernan Family Environmental Fellowship
Kobby Hanson
Kobby Hanson is a MIDS student interested in utilizing renewable resources and smart data tools to transform energy systems in Africa. Ghana, where Hanson is from, suffers from frequent power outages as a result of multiple factors such as power supply shortages, aging infrastructure, and more. Growing up in this environment inspired him to study electrical engineering and look deeply into how technology can transform lives. “Data science, to me, is more than algorithms or predictions. It is a tool for fairness and equity, I see it as a bridge between people and possibility,” said Hanson.
Hanson wants to establish a foundation that will support local startups with data science knowledge to build sustainable products and make informed business decisions. In particular, he wants to inspire those who are eager to innovate but may lack the knowledge or infrastructure to do so. “Ultimately, I want to take what I learn and give back to develop efficient energy models, consult for small enterprises, and help shape a future where innovation serves everyone, not just a few,” he said.
Ando Shah
Fifth-year Ph.D. student and 2022-23 Quigley/Heffernan Fellow Ando Shah has accomplished a lot since first receiving the fellowship. In particular, he completed two major projects focused on artificial intelligence and environmental sustainability: Panopticon, a satellite foundation model that achieved state-of-the-art results, as well as a collaboration with Microsoft and The Nature Conservatory that addressed India’s groundwater depletion issue. “The earlier award enabled me to expand my work into new domains that have since achieved both academic distinction and meaningful real-world outcomes,” he said.
Now, Shah’s work focuses on two new projects: mapping illegal riverbed mining across India and developing AI models to pinpoint carbon emissions sources. The former, Sand Mining Watch, partners with NGOs and civil society organizations to explore the practice’s impacts on flooding and erosion, as well as to prosecute entities for environmental crimes. “This work bridges data science, governance, and environmental justice, illustrating how transparent, data-driven monitoring can empower communities and strengthen accountability,” Shah said. With this fellowship, he plans to advance his research at Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, where he will collaborate with climate and weather modeling experts.
Paul Fasana LGBTQ Studies Fellowship
Marisa Hall
MICS student Marisa Hall’s research aims to quantify and address platform risk for marginalized users, in particular LGBTQ+ youth. In recent years, they noticed a significant increase in anti-LGBTQ+ bills being introduced and passed, and saw the social media landscape turn more volatile. These changes have placed vulnerable youth at risk of doxxing, cyberbullying, and more. “For vulnerable LGBT+ populations, the stakes of inadequate cybersecurity are measured not just in dollars but in lives, with 41% of transgender adults attempting suicide at least once,” they stated.
In order to better understand the risks these youth face, Hall built a formula that could help social platforms calculate how vulnerable a population is on their site using demographic data and take the appropriate steps to address these risks. They also included recommendations to make the platforms more secure-by-design and prioritize privacy, such as hiding sensitive information by default, establishing explicit policies against LGBTQ+ targeted abuse, and partnering with LGBTQ+ organizations. “The convergence of political hostility, technological vulnerability, and platform governance failures demands immediate, decisive action from leaders who understand that protecting the most vulnerable protects us all,” Hall said.
Curtis B. Smith Cybersecurity Fellowship, 2025-26
Yinwei Sun
Yinwei Sun, a second-year MIMS student, currently serves as a key researcher on a project that aims to reduce harmful API calls in large language models (LLMs). API calls, also known as API requests, allow one application to request data or services from another application. While not inherently harmful, these calls are vulnerable to cyber attacks and data breaches, especially when working with external systems. In her work, Sun explores these vulnerabilities and utilizes machine learning to develop solutions.
With the help of this fellowship, Sun is interested in researching how to secure video generation models against manipulation and deepfakes, how to advance the security of LLM-based systems, and how privacy-preserving federated learning techniques for AI systems can handle sensitive user data.”My background in AI development, combined with my current focus on AI safety, positions me to contribute meaningful insights to the field of cybersecurity, particularly as it relates to emerging AI technologies,” she said. “Through this fellowship, I hope to contribute to making AI systems not just powerful, but fundamentally secure and trustworthy.”
Jack Larson Data for Good Fellowship
Anna Mowat
Anna Mowat is a MIDS student dedicated to building, improving, and growing open access datasets that help track who owns energy and heavy industry assets. Asset data, which often pulls from sources such as combustion plants or pipelines, are supposed to track greenhouse gas emissions and show who is in charge. This data can then be used to hold industries and specific asset owners accountable for their emissions, helping to push forward the transition to clean energy.
As the lead of a team that investigates the owners of these assets, Mowat has utilized her education to bring data science into the picture by automating parts of the research process. “My colleagues run datasets tracking all the types of energy and heavy industry assets, their locations, operation status, and environmental impacts,” she explained. “Our data helps policymakers improve policy mechanisms, corporations find pain points in their supply chains, and activists hold polluters to account.”
Stephanie Andrews
MIDS student Stephanie Andrews has worked with the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center’s Investigations Lab and Berkeley Law’s Global Rights Innovation Lab to bring data science tools to individuals and organizations. At the former, she helped document human rights abuses and support international accountability efforts; at the latter, she collaborated with lawyers, human rights practitioners, and technologists to test systems that help legal aid organizations and NGOs integrate emerging technologies into their work. “Data science methods can help investigators work more quickly and reliably — streamlining analysis, expediting discovery, and strengthening the evidentiary record in environments where both truth and lives are at risk,” she said.
“Whether I’m building a model to classify human rights violations or experimenting with computer vision to support investigations, I see data science as a form of care: a way of listening closely, noticing what’s missing, and reconnecting data to human context. I’m most proud of the moments when this work helps others connect information to action,” Andrews continued. She hopes to continue exploring ways to utilize data-driven methods to support humanitarian efforts and build the capacity of advocates to leverage data responsibly and effectively.
Roshni Misra
For MIDS student Roshni Misra, environmental sustainability and food justice are topics worthy of exploration. Upon moving to San Francisco, she was introduced to an app that allowed customers to purchase discounted surplus meals that would have otherwise gone to waste. This experience gave her insight into the problem of food waste, which is when restaurants often over-prepare inventory due to unpredictable demand.
To help address this issue, Misra began utilizing her data science skills to build a predictive program that will model restaurant demand to better align supply with projected consumption. In cases of surplus, the system will then identify opportunities to redirect food to local shelters or food banks. “The Jack Larson Data for Good Fellowship would support the implementation and testing phase of my food waste forecasting model with community partners and enable me to scale its image,” she said. “This project could create measurable social impact by reducing food waste, lowering emissions, and improving access to food for those in need.”
If you are interested in supporting I School students through fellowship funding, please reach out to Director of Philanthropy Tia Foss, or see our giving page.
