Team Members

Annika Marie Schoene, PhD

Faculty Director

Gautham Vijay Kumar

PhD Student, Computer Science

Resmi Ramachandranpillai, PhD

Research Scientist

Anson Antony, MS

Research Engineer

Affiliates

Laura Haaber Ihle, PhD

AI Ethicist

William Nardi, PhD

Qualitative Researcher

Cansu Canca, PhD

Philosopher

Former Members

Benjamin Irving Research Assistant, B.S. Computer Science
Sia Shah IHESJR Intern, B.S. Health Science
Janelle Lardizabal IHESJR Intern, BS Behavioral Neuroscience
Iman Ibrahim IHESJR Intern, BA Public Health

Annika Marie Schoene, PhD

Faculty Director

Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Health and Health Sciences at Northeastern University. Her research focuses on the safety, robustness, and evaluation of large-scale AI systems, with particular emphasis on applications in healthcare. She develops technical methods and evaluation frameworks to study how AI systems behave and fail in real-world settings, including identifying high-risk behaviors such as jailbreaks, harmful outputs, and unsafe system behavior.

Gautham Vijay Kumar

PhD Student, Computer Science

Gautham Vijay Kumar is a Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science and Engineering at Florida International University, where his research centers on robust, interpretable, and scalable Clinical NLP and agent-based AI systems. His work focuses on extracting structured knowledge from unstructured healthcare data spanning Substance Use Disorders, Mental Health, and Social Determinants of Health, including the development of Stability-Aware, Evidence-Grounded Knowledge Graphs, presented at EACL 2026.

Gautham’s technical toolkit spans PyTorch, LLMs, AI Agents, and deep learning architectures, complemented by full-stack proficiency in Python, ReactJS, and cloud infrastructure on Azure. He collaborates with industry partners including NimbleMind’s Chief AI Officer on responsible agentic AI deployment in psychiatric care and actively serves as a peer reviewer for LREC 2026, IEEE SECON 2026, and DCOSS-IoT 2026.

Resmi Ramachandranpillai, PhD

Research Scientist

Resmi Ramachandranpillai is a Research Scientist in the Responsible AI Practice at Northeastern University where she conducts research in Responsible Artificial Intelligence with a focus on fairness, robustness, privacy, and explainability. Her work bridges foundational research and applied impact in domains such as healthcare, mental health, finance, and synthetic data.

She holds a PhD in Neural Optimization from the National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli, India, and has held academic and research positions across India, Sweden, and the U.S. These include serving as an Assistant Professor at IIIT Kottayam, India, and as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Linköping University, Sweden. She has also led research initiatives as part of the EU-funded TAILOR Trustworthy AI network, the largest network of institutions in Europe focused on advancing the foundations of trustworthy AI.

Resmi’s work has been published in top-tier venues including CVPR, ACL, ECAI, JAIR, and IEEE Transactions, and she regularly serves as a program committee member for premier conferences and journals including IJCAI, ECAI, AAAI, JAIR, JMLR, and CVPR. She has been an invited speaker at academic institutions and international events, including IT University of Copenhagen, SRM University, MIRAI2.0 (Japan-Sweden collaboration), and the International Conclave on Generative AI in India.

Her work and perspective on the intersection of socio-technical systems have been featured in Computer Vision News, Khaleej Times, TechBullion, Free Press Journal, Silicon India, and Business Deccan, highlighting her global impact in building accountable and equitable AI systems for social good.

Laura Haaber Ihle, PhD

AI Ethicist

Laura Haaber Ihle is a philosopher whose work sits at the intersection of AI ethics, epistemology, and AI safety and governance, working across academia and industry to ensure that AI systems are developed and deployed responsibly. She is the founder of the Viral Epistemology Lab, an initiative dedicated to identifying, categorising, and mitigating epistemic risks in technology, from misinformation and hallucinations to broken information distribution networks. Alongside her research, she consults with private and public sector organisations on responsible AI implementation, governance frameworks, and assessment tools. Laura has held research positions at Harvard University’s Department of Philosophy and Northeastern University’s Institute for Experiential AI, and served as VP of Ethics, Governance and Policy at the Responsible AI Future Foundation. She is a long-standing associate researcher at the AI Ethics Lab, an Expert Panelist on the MIT Sloan Management Review International Panel of AI Experts, a member of several IEEE working groups, and an associate editor at Springer Nature. She holds a PhD in philosophy, political science, and economics.

laurahaaberihle.com →

Anson Antony, MS

Research Engineer

Anson Antony is a Research Engineer at the Meronym Lab. His research focuses on ontology-aware retrieval, multi-agent LLM systems, and parameter-efficient fine-tuning of clinical language models under privacy constraints. He also leads AI at MAIA Healthcare, applying this work to automated medical coding in orthopaedic care.

William Nardi, PhD

Qualitative Researcher

William (Bill) Nardi holds an Sc.M. and Ph.D. from Brown University. His postdoctoral research appointment is in the Department of Behavioral and Social Sciences and the Mindfulness Center at Brown. He is interested in patient-centered research for the development of comprehensive, integrative digital treatments for mental health and substance use, including the safe integration of generative AI into patient-facing interventions. He specializes in conducting usability testing, contextual inquiry, and iterative user experience research to ensure digital therapeutics are not only clinically effective but genuinely safe and aligned with the needs of the communities they are designed for through qualitative and mixed-methods data collection.

Cansu Canca, PhD

Philosopher

Dr. Cansu Canca is a philosopher and the Founder and Director of AI Ethics Lab, and Director of Responsible AI Practice at Northeastern University. An appointed member of the WHO Technical Advisory Group on AI for Health and a collaborator with the World Economic Forum’s AI Governance Alliance, she advises organizations on responsible AI governance and strategy. She previously held positions at the University of Hong Kong and was an ethics researcher at Harvard Law School, Harvard School of Public Health, and Harvard Medical School. A two-time TEDx speaker, she has given over 150 talks on AI ethics worldwide.

cansucanca.com →