Dr. Zining Yang is Senior Manager at Southern California Edison. She also works as Adjunct Professor at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and Associate Director at the TransResearch Consortium. She sits on the Board of the Computational Social Science Society of the Americas (CSSSA) and serves as Scientific Advisory Board Member for Human Factors and Simulations. She received her Ph.D. in Computational and Applied Mathematics and Political Economy from Claremont Graduate University. Her research interests include data analytics, machine learning, modeling and simulation, complex adaptive systems, agent-based models, and network analysis. She has published numerous times in the fields of computer science, economics, public policy, and political science. She has been identified as Outstanding Researcher by the government, worked on a National Science Foundation-sponsored project, and won multiple awards from various organizations, including the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China, International Social Computing, Behavioral Modeling and Prediction, and the International Institute of Informatics and Systemics.Dr. Santiago Núñez-Corrales is a Research Scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Faculty Affiliate at the Center for Global Studies and Lecturer at the School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He obtained his Doctorate in Informatics University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with a minor in Global Studies in 2020. Dr. Núñez-Corrales has received multiple awards, including the 2017 SIGHPC ACM/Intel Computational and Data Science Fellowship. His research focuses on developing mathematical and computational methods to unveil statistical physics aspects governing complex multiscale stochastic systems, or strongly coupled, heterogeneous open systems whose description requires events at multiple scales, and whose action is dictated by irreversible thermodynamics. Prior to this, Dr. Núñez-Corrales served as Director General of Research and Technology Development at the Ministry of Science, Technology and Telecommunications in Costa Rica, where he directed the development of the National Plan for Science, Technology and Innovation 2015-2021 across multiple economic sectors and other science and technology foresight exercises.
