Benjamin Toff studies news audiences in the contemporary media environment. He is the leading expert on news avoidance, the subject of a co-authored book (2023), and previously led the most extensive, international study to date on trust in news as a fellow at the University of Oxford. His work grapples with both the political implications of the public’s growing disconnection from news and its impact on the sustainability of the industry.

Hannah Neprash is a health economist whose research focuses on the delivery and financing of health care. As the expense and complexity of American health care continues to grow, Dr. Neprash works to build a more efficient and resilient health care system. Her research studies new threats (cyberattacks in health care), persistent challenges (public insurance reimbursement design), and emerging opportunities (artificial intelligence in medicine). Dr. Neprash publishes in leading medical, clinical, and economics journals.

Terresa A. Moses is a community-engaged scholar who uses applied research and creative works to intentionally intersect three areas of expertise, all of which are centered in Black liberation and anti-racism: 1) design curriculum and pedagogical approaches, 2) community building and abolitionist organizing, and 3) empowering Black women. Some of her work includes her solo exhibition, Umbra, her community distro project, Stop Killing Black People, her applied research project, Project Naptural, and her co-created curriculum and framework, Racism Untaught.

William Leeb researches the design and analysis of efficient algorithms that are robust to corruption of the input data. Sources of corruption can include missing values, geometric perturbations, noise, and other types of information loss. Datasets with these challenges are encountered across numerous domains, from structural biology to image processing.

Peter Larsen is a molecular biologist who leads an interdisciplinary research team spanning several colleges and departments across the university. He is Co-Director of the Minnesota Center for Prion Research and Outreach and has spearheaded an effort to develop new diagnostic tools for animal and human prion diseases. This work has resulted in the development of an exciting new class of portable tools that can detect biomarkers for several neurodegenerative diseases. Dr. Larsen also specializes in studies of mammalian biodiversity and zoonotic disease surveillance.