Fritz Family Fellows Program
The Fritz Family Fellows Program is a joint effort among Georgetown’s three campuses and nine schools to harness technology for the betterment of humanity. The fellowship program aims to cultivate the next generation of leaders with expertise in the social impacts of technology, and build a network of public interest technologists who learn from and support each other’s work.
Please contact fritzfellows@georgetown.edu with any queries!
2020-2021 Fellows
Past Fritz Fellows
Adam Ginsburg
Undergraduate Fritz Family Fellow
Obinna (Obi) Iloani
Law Fritz Family Fellow
Romina Montellano Morales
Law Fritz Family Fellow
Shuo Liu
Philosophy Ph.D. Fritz Family Fellow
Shuo is a second-year PhD student at Georgetown University in computer science. His current research interest lies in the area of fault-tolerant distributed optimization algorithms and implementations, including distributed machine learning, specifically Byzantine fault-tolerant models. Prior to that, he obtained his master’s degree in computer science at Georgetown, and undergraduate degree in mathematics at Fudan University, China. His master’s thesis studied a type of possible privacy exposures of users on social media.
Agoritsa Polyzou
Professional Fritz Family Fellow
Agoritsa Polyzou is a Fritz Postdoctoral Fellow in the Massive Data Institute (MDI). She is conducting research and engaging in projects with faculty from the MDI and the Department of Computer Science at the intersection of big data, machine learning, and fairness. Her goal is to understand and measure how models can be biased towards groups of people with different characteristics and figure out ways to mitigate such events. Agoritsa supports and encourages women’s participation in the computer science field.
Agoritsa earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota, where she worked in educational data mining. She developed models and algorithms for the tasks of performance prediction and course recommendation in higher education. She earned her Bachelors’s degree in Computer Engineering and Informatics from the University of Patras, Greece.
Madeline Pfister
Undergraduate Fritz Family Fellow
Madeline is a Georgetown sophomore from Williamsburg, Virginia majoring in Operations and Information Management and minoring in Statistics. She spent the summer of 2020 as a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow studying data ethics in the credit card industry. In her free time, Madeline loves to read a good book.
As a Fritz Fellow, Madeline works with the Massive Data Institute (MDI) and PEW Charitable Trust to work towards a Civil Justice Data Commons. The purpose of the Civil Justice Data Commons is to provide data to those working in civil justice and to propose a data governance model.
Meenakshi Balan
Undergraduate Fritz Family Fellow
Meenakshi is a junior in the School of Foreign Service studying International Politics with a concentration in International Law and minors in Computer Science, and Russian. After graduating from Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, she has spent her time at Georgetown seeking to understand the intersection of politics and technology from a multitude of perspectives. From learning about state-sponsored surveillance at St. Petersburg State University in Russia and researching tech antitrust issues as a fellow at Princeton University, to experiencing presidential election dynamics firsthand as an analytics intern on the Biden campaign, Meenakshi is keen to explore and understand the ways in which technology influences the world and, in particular, politics. She is excited to return to the Massive Data Institute’s Election 2020 project as a Fritz Fellow helping to analyze digital media sources in order to better understand the issues and themes driving the 2020 Election.
Arjun Ravi
Undergraduate Fritz Family Fellow
Arjun is a junior in the College studying Economics and Mathematics and minoring in Government. Over the past two years, Arjun has researched issues in the economics of crime, including how algorithmic risk assessments in the criminal justice system affect sentences and judge preferences. He is a passionate member of the Georgetown Mock Trial Team and on the Steering Committee for Georgetown’s Carroll Round Conference on International Economics, an undergraduate economics research conference. In his free time, you can find Arjun at the rock-climbing gym or listening to podcasts on politics, law, and economics. As a Fritz Fellow, Arjun works with The Massive Data Institute (MDI), GU Politics, and The Computer Science Department to analyze social and digital media related to the 2020 presidential and congressional campaigns. The purpose of this work is to enrich the public dialogue about the campaigns and to develop analytics that will be useful to scholars producing peer-reviewed research on election outcomes.
Jason Farr
Ph.D. Fritz Family Fellow
Jason studies ethics as a doctoral student in the philosophy department at Georgetown. Jason holds a B.A. in Political Philosophy, Policy, and Law from the University of Virginia and an M.A. in Philosophy from Northern Illinois University. His Ph.D. dissertation argues that traditional theories concerning the foundations of ethics ought to take more seriously the ways in which those foundations are inextricably social. As a Fritz Fellow, he will be looking at foundational values underlying research ethics that are challenged by the granular, real-world context of research using social media and other organic data. Outside of philosophy, Jason is an avid hiker and amateur botanist. Some of his favorite memories were formed at Nature Camp in Virginia, where he served as an instructor for six years, and on the Appalachian Trail, which he thru-hiked in 2012.
Wyatt Hoffman
Professional Fritz Family Fellow
Wyatt Hoffman is a Research Fellow with the CyberAI Project at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET). As a Fritz Fellow, Wyatt explores the implications of artificial intelligence (namely, machine learning) for international competition and conflict in cyberspace. At the intersection of computer science and geopolitics, Wyatt’s research takes an interdisciplinary approach and attempts to forecast the impacts of machine learning on cyber operations. His work aims to help policymakers understand and manage the risks of cyber conflict and promote the stability and security of cyberspace.
Previously, Wyatt was a senior research analyst with the Cyber Policy Initiative at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where his work focused on cyber strategy, the role of the private sector in cybersecurity, and the intersection of nuclear weapons and cybersecurity. Wyatt holds an M.A. in War Studies from King’s College London, where he was a Rotary Global Grant Scholar in Peace and Conflict Prevention and Resolution. He earned a B.A. in political science from Truman State University.
