Meet Our Team

Katie Marsh coordinates community efforts and the volunteer project, EndCoronavirus.org. She earned her B.A. from Clark University in Psychology and Evolutionary Biology. She is a trained Open Dialogue Facilitator.  Katie has spend most of her career managing human service non-profit programs and in outreach counseling. Katie enjoys canine science, training and volunteering with local dog rescues. 

Dr. Leila Hedayatifar joined NECSI as a postdoctoral researcher fellow. She holds a PhD in Physics. Leila’s research includes noisy time series, the growth of rough surfaces far from equilibrium, and the dynamics of complex social systems from a statistical physics point of view. She is interested in artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques that are applicable in social and economic systems. A major focus of her current research is understanding the structure of societies and changes in this structure over time, based on differing social and geographic properties and using statistical analysis and agent-based models.  For EndCoronavirus, she is the PI in a NSF granted project to optimize the quarantine policies using the mobility patterns of individuals and the severity of COVID-19 contagion in different areas. She is also developing a model to understand the evolution of the epidemic and to plan efficient management strategies.

Dr. Amir Akhavan joined the NECSI team as a postdoctoral research fellow. He works in the areas of data mining and analysis, including supply chain, medical, and weather data analysis. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Science Malaysia in the field of Cryptography, with a focus on the application of chaotic systems to the development of novel Crypto-primitives. Amir is interested in applying methods used in chaos theory to the analysis of complex systems.  With EndCoronavirus, his work is primarily focused on the extraction of pandemic data, developing modified SEIR models for investigation of interventions, information visualization, and CT scan image processing.

Blake Elias is working on machine learning, optimization and data visualization for COVID-19 response. His current work includes network analysis, optimal allocation of scarce testing resources, and sequential decision-making for optimal containment strategy. Before joining NECSI and EndCoronavirus, Blake was an AI Resident at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA, working on neural-symbolic systems and human-AI collaboration. Before that, Blake completed his SB and MEng degrees at MIT in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; his master's thesis focused on the intersection of robotics and synthetic biology. Learn more about Blake's work.

Dr. Qinghua Chen is a Professor at Beijing Normal University in the field of Systems Theory.  He is currently a visiting researcher at NECSI and conducts outreach to Chinese scholars and frontline workers for EndCoronavirus.  He has been conducting research with his students on combining community-based monitoring with contact tracing to control COVID-19.

Dr Stephane Bilodeau is an entrepreneur and as founded 2 Cleantech companies (Novacab.us and Enerstat), holds a Master in Applied Sciences and a PhD in Energy & Advanced Thermodynamics, and has worked for more than 20 years in the development and deployment of technologies notably associated with Renewables and Energy storage as well as with Data Science, Experimental Methods & Artificial Intelligence.

He has been lecturer and Associate professor at the University of Sherbrooke for 17 years. He’s an expert contributor for TowardsDataScience and EnergyCentral.

He is an active member and fellow of Engineers Associations in Canada, including being Vice-president of the Public Affairs Advisory Committee for EngineersCanada.ca and co-founder of a Charity foundation for which he is the Chairman of the Awards Committee (FOIQ.qc.ca).

He is involved with Endcoronavirus.org in different groups (notably Choose-life-today, custom-guidelines and response-sci-volunteer-database), he is working on the Nursing Homes Project (data analytics on the evolution of the COVID-19 outcomes in many reporting countries and states), and he is the coordinator of the #High-Risk-Institutions outreach channel working on new guidelines.

Chen is a student researcher of NECSI with a B.E. in Computer Science and M.A. in Communications. For ECV, he is working on daily updates, writing guidelines, conducting outreach, and producing data visualizations. He is also involved with projects on disease modeling and the use of CT-scans for COVID-19 diagnosis. 

Dr. Patricia Silveyra is an Associate Professor at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA), where she leads a research laboratory studying mechanisms of lung disease. She is originally from Argentina and has lived in the US for the past 12 years. She has helped lead the team translating and maintaining the Spanish version of the endcoronavirus.org website, as well as translating documents for outreach and general public education.

Angela Rose Whaley has executed and managed some of the most successful mobile fundraising campaigns in history, including work with HBO, AT&T, NFL, American Red Cross, Stand Up To Cancer, Comic Relief/Red Nose Day, Hand in Hand with Scooter Braun Projects & Den of Thieves, National Geographic, (RED), Feeding America, World Food Program USA, and more. She is co-founder of the nonprofit Music Minds Matter, and partner at the digital marketing and lead gen agency, Clixigen.

Angela currently manages the EndCoronavirus email newsletter and consults on the overall digital marketing strategy including social media, town halls, website conversions, and analytics. 

Joaquín Beltrán is the creator of Speak Up America, a web platform and Alexa skill that connects you to your elected representatives which he has recently deployed to scale EndCoronavirus.org’s advocacy efforts across the United States. His parents are Mexican immigrants who came to the U.S. in pursuit of the American dream through building small businesses which he helped to eventually run and grow. He is an alumnus of the Coro Fellowship in Public Affairs, and in 2014, began building software to scale his efforts to make positive changes in the world. He is currently leading the Coronavirus Community Organizer Roundtable and building tools and frameworks to help organizers advocate effectively at the local, state, and federal levels.

Alexander Siegenfeld is a PhD student in the MIT Physics Department researching political and economic systems at the New England Complex Systems Institute and the MIT Media Lab’s Laboratory for Social Machines.  He received a B.S. in physics and mathematics, also from MIT, and is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and a Hertz Fellow. Originally interested in combining chemical intuition with mathematical rigor to further the understanding of materials with exotic and useful properties, he shifted his focus to applying concepts and methods from statistical physics to further the understanding of social phenomena, including instability in democratic elections, macroeconomic development, and the interactions between social and biological systems that cause and can stop the spread of disease.  He has interned at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, bringing a complex systems perspective to bear on problems in global health and development.  For EndCoronavirus he has conducted research on the impact of travel and timing on eliminating the virus, as well as on the proper use of models for real-world decision-making during pandemics.

Robin Kazemieh holds Master's degrees in Business Administration and in Finance from University of Hamburg and Universidad Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. He is a serial entrepreneur in the areas of bio-based products and sustainable finance and has served as managing director and CFO for innovative start-ups. He has raised considerable funds and government grants from various institutions and negotiated technology partnerships with some of the largest German corporations.

Inga Müllner holds a Master's degree in Business Administration. She has worked for over 10 years for one of the leading German multi-channel corporations in FMCG managing e-commerce projects, webshop management, online and offline marketing campaigns and analytics. Currently she is consulting companies in the finance and health sector regarding their (online) presence, customer communication and process optimization.

Inga & Robin have been working with ECV since March 2020 on communication strategies and developing ideas on how and whom to spread the ECV message.