Team Members

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.

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.

Anson Antony is a Research Engineer at the Meronym Lab, where his work bridges applied healthcare AI and academic research. His research centers on information retrieval for clinical text, including ontology-aware and structure-aware retrieval, alongside multi-agent LLM systems, multimodal learning, and parameter-efficient fine-tuning of language models under privacy constraints. His prior published work spans computer vision, natural language processing, machine learning, and brain–computer interfaces, and this foundation informs his current focus on retrieval and reasoning techniques for high-stakes clinical settings. He also leads AI at Maia Medical Billing Corp, where he develops and deploys novel retrieval and reasoning methods for automated medical coding in orthopaedic care.

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.

Todd Quartiere is the Founder and CEO of the Center for Practical AI, a North Carolina-based nonprofit teaching AI literacy and fluency. His research examines how disposition and task design determine whether AI use erodes or elevates critical thinking using a framework he has developed. He translates this work into applied training programs for healthcare and life sciences organizations, public education resources on AI harms, and community initiatives across North Carolina. Previously, Todd served as the Head of Responsible AI at Vynamic. Across 15 years in digital enablement, he has advised more than 200 organizations on practical, human-centered adoption of emerging technology. He holds a Master of Management in Clinical Informatics from Duke University.

Aminat has previously focused on AI applications of real-time sensing sensor design and applications for blockchain and healthcare, particularly the IBM Electronic Volatile Analyzer TM (EVA) design and operation. Based on her contributions, particularly in the analytics and experimental domain, she was able to attain two high value patents for IBM.
Her innovations, leadership and mentorship led to her appointment and recognition in the IBM Global Technology Outlook as the Sensors Lead in crafting the global strategy of all sensor teams for IBM business. This impact was extended as a part of her strategic direction and leadership as a Research Program Manager in the Tech for Justice research initiative at IBM.
Her work included assembling colleagues with specific expertise to seed ideas and address critical social justice problems. She also defined and managed the yearly call for proposals (CFP) processes, helped project leaders to define clear goals, deliverables, workstreams and effective collaboration models with cross-functional partners. Through this involvement, her previous track record and her individual research in Digital Equity, and management of the Fairness in Media research catalogue, she was inducted into the IBM Academy of Technology.
Aminat launched the IBM Tech for Impact Learning Series that has generated almost 90 hours of content in collaboration with global experts in responsible AI and science and technology studies (STS) domains. This series has garnered a global audience across all IBM geographies and business units, including 7000 unique participants and an accumulation of 17,000 hours of learning for the community. The seminars and courses provided through the learning series bring awareness to key technology topics and helps participants understand how to advance technology at all relevant business touchpoints with inclusion and ethics in mind.
Through her intrapreneurial skills, she set up and manages the IBM Tech for Impact Learning Series. These efforts as a producer, host and manager of this learning series that has fostered almost 90 hours of content in collaboration with eminent and globally respected experts in Responsible AI and the Science, Technology and Society domains.
The series is a cult success, and boasts a global audience across all IBM geographies and business units, including 7000 unique learners and 17000 learning hours. This series has covered and highlighted a variety of topics, including Agentic AI, AI bias, quantum, computational NLP, environmental justice, fairness in media and inclusive language technologies. All these influence and shape the advancement of technology at all touchpoints of IBM functions and business with an ethical and responsible perspective, which further strengthens IBM’s commitment to responsible and ethical technology as a competitive advantage, emphasizing transparency, explainability and risk-based regulation.
Serving as a Research Program Manager, Technical Architect, and Theme Lead, Aminat drives strategic technology initiatives while shaping internal AI and quantum strategy through advisory roles supporting executive-level forums such as TT-ELT and TT-Core.
She is also an Ecosystem Engagement Leader, contributing to initiatives like the Tech for Impact and Tech Strategy Series, and fostering community development through responsible technology education and adoption.
Aminat has made significant contributions to the evaluation of corrections and mitigations within Granite Guardian, supporting its planned release and advancing IBM’s open-source strategy through the development of evaluation frameworks and tools for Responsible AI, LLMs, GenAI, and NLP. Her work has led to multiple publications in leading venues, including NeurIPS, EMNLP, and arXiv. Aminat has contributed to IBM’s open-source strategy through her 2025 A-Level research accomplishment on Granite Guardian, including research contributions to mitigator evaluation efforts that led to the release of an active LoRA model on HuggingFace.
Aminat has received multiple awards in recognition of her research achievements and contributions in improving the organizational culture. These include an IBM Culture Catalyst Award in 2021 and an IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Award (OTAA) in 2024. Recently, she has been recognized as a Modern Day Technology Leader and in the IBM Tech 2026 cohort.

Amanda Choflet, DNP, RN, NEA-BC, serves as Dean of the School of Nursing at Northeastern University, where she leads comprehensive nursing education programs across multiple campuses including Boston, Charlotte, Fall River, and Burlington, Massachusetts. Her portfolio encompasses BSN, accelerated BSN, Direct Entry, MSN, DNP, CRNA, and PhD programs, with strategic partnerships including a distinguished collaboration with Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in oncology nursing education. Dr. Choflet’s research focuses on substance use and the emotional wellbeing of nurses, nursing students, and other vulnerable populations, exploring maladaptive coping mechanisms and the ways modern healthcare structures influence the help-seeking behaviors of health professionals. With over 20 years of healthcare experience spanning clinical practice, administration, research, and academic leadership, Dr. Choflet brings extensive expertise in oncology and global public health to her role. She received her Doctor of Nursing Practice degree from Johns Hopkins University and her Bachelor of Science in Nursing and Master of Science in Nursing degrees from the University of Maryland. Her research has influenced national nursing policy through organizations such as the National Council of State Boards of Nursing, and she received grant funding from the American Association of Colleges of Nursing and the Centers for Disease Control for her evidence-based practice work in substance use.

Dr Mestre is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton and a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute (24-26 cohort). His research is interdisciplinary and focuses on the responsible development and socio-technical evaluation of emerging technologies, at the interface of disciplines like computer science, science and technology studies and political science. He investigates the ethical, social and policy implications of emerging technologies such as biohybrid robotics (through the Biohybrid Futures research programme), AI for mental health (through the RAI4MH programme) and currently distributed acoustic sensing (DAS). He is PI of the £1.2M UKRI Cross-Research Council grant SOUNDSCALE, investigating the responsible development of distributed fibre optic sensing through inter- and transdisciplinary research with the physical, computer and social sciences, arts and humanities, and engagement with citizens, policymakers, nonprofits and industry.

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.