Houssam Kherraz

2022 Design & Technology Fellow

Houssam, a native Moroccan, was a 2022 Design & Technology Fellow. Currently a software engineer at Kensho, an AI company working on structuring unstructured data (audio, documents, etc.) for finance firms, his work involves building machine learning tools and infrastructure to make data science teams more effective in their work. In the past, he has worked on self-driving cars and facial recognition technology. Houssam holds a masters and bachelors in Computer Science from MIT, where he focused on how to improve and understand AI systems to prevent harm.

Houssam reports “I am quite worried about the unintended consequences of AI and of its rapid progression of capabilities. Beyond the potential rapid job loss, we already know that these systems can exhibit a lot of social bias (racism, sexism, etc.) and spout completely false statements with high confidence and convincing justifications. Yet, tech companies and nation states seem to be locked in an ‘AI arms race,’ obsessed with overall performance rather than failure modes and societal guardrails. To use an analogy of a friend of mine, the current situation is akin to building the fastest car without brakes. While brakes technically slow you down, they actually enable us all to go faster. Without good brakes, we would all be driving too slowly or not at all to avoid a crash. Brakes give us the confidence to drive faster and safer. Similarly, AI safety measures will help us go faster and further in the long run. I only hope that the crash that will make the industry realize this won’t be too damaging.

“I want to leave you with the results of a survey and a question. The 2022 Expert Survey on AI asked machine learning researchers last summer: what is the probability that the long-run effect of advanced AI on humanity will be extremely bad? 48% of the research professionals they surveyed gave at least a 10% chance of an extremely bad outcome. What do you think is the psychology of these professionals in their approach to their work?”

Houssam reflects: “One way to measure the impact of an experience is to consider how often we find ourselves reflecting on it. Since my fellowship trip in June, I have frequently spent time looking back on my FASPE experience and unpacking its lessons. FASPE taught me, more than any other experience, about the power of place and the fallacy of being a ‘bystander.’ The focus on the perpetrators of Nazi Germany’s professional class made it crystal clear to me how the motivations, thinking patterns, and excuses for enabling "the system" are not so different from those prevalent in our own professions today. This realization was scary and powerful. It further highlighted for me the importance of constant self-reflection and self-critique. Smart professionals can be incredibly good at fooling themselves with intricate rationalizations, or at least I know I can be. Having a community of other professionals in FASPE who can push me, keep me honest, and with whom I share a powerful emotional experience is extremely valuable to me. I hope it will make me more courageous and more likely to uphold high ethical standards in my profession. I am very grateful to be part of the FASPE community.”

Jordan Loewen-Colón

2014 Seminary Fellow

Jordan was a 2014 Seminary Fellow. He is currently serving as the AI, Ethics, and Data Justice Fellow at Queen’s University in Kingson, Ontario, Canada. In this role, he combines philosophy and data science to theorize human-AI interactions with respect to questions of metaphysics, technology, and healthcare.

The primary object of his research is an AI diagnostic tool called the "Digital Cancer Twin” currently in development at the Center for Health Innovation. This fellowship began in the summer 2021 as he was finishing his PhD dissertation in Religion at Syracuse University entitled “Virtual Reality, Religious Experience, and Digital Dualism.” His research specialization involves exploring the metaphysics of 21st-century digital technologies like virtual reality and AI in North American contexts.

Through this work, he questions how emerging technologies reconfigure and disrupt assumptions about embodiment, subjectivity, and other values rooted in American Protestantism, especially its more aesthetics-oriented and mystical movements. Some of this work is already available in research journals with more to come in the soon-to-be-released DCT Project Podcast. So stay tuned!

In Jordan’s words: “FASPE was such a grounding experience for how I perceive reality and played a large part in my interest in studying the consequences of how humans construct “realities” and induce altered states of consciousness.

“The program also helped me understand the role of religion in this process. With each historical example, it became clearer that religion is at work in every process that humans find ourselves a part of. Whether it be politics, education, media, science, and on and on. Religion can be fiery and dramatic, thick as culture, or banal and hidden in the everyday. By virtue of its hiddenness, we often do not notice how it works in and through us or how it gets taken up, like other human technologies, to dampen or extend our activity in the world.

“I think back often on all those important conversations we had in our small groups after exploring the horrifyingly “sacred” spaces full of so much pain. How we would gather together to grieve and process, to share our frustration at trying to integrate the stinging and contradictory awe and wonder. Shaking our collective heads, holding hands, and encouraging each other to imagine and activate a better future, informed by the trauma of the past.

“Ultimately, FASPE helped me realize how vulnerable our perceptions of reality can be, while also giving me the tools of deep and profound hope for how we might heal and protect the things that matter most.”

Bella Ryb

2022 Law Fellow

Bella was a 2022 Law Fellow. She is currently a 2L at Stanford Law School and the incoming president of Stanford Law Review Volume 76. This spring, she will participate in Stanford’s Supreme Court Clinic. An aspiring legal academic, Bella intends to dedicate her career to theorizing the intellectual history and normative political content of the law. She has a special interest in how the law intersects with and shapes cultural understandings of gender, sex, and social class. In April at the Midwest Political Science Association's annual conference, she will present a forthcoming paper on how so-called “sex exceptionalist” reforms to intellectual property and contract law will help promote the sexual autonomy of pornography performers.

In Bella’s words: “FASPE was a sobering illustration that the law itself is not a static, dependable bulwark of justice but a tool that embodies and gives force to the commitments of those who create and enforce it. Developments in the law, then, always carry with them the risk of harm to individuals, communities, and crucial values.

“But despite the overwhelming grief and despondency which washed over me at many of the sites we visited, FASPE was ultimately a source of great hope. The earnest and creative discussions I shared with so many brilliant young professionals and exceptional faculty reminded me that while the law can promote violence, it can also be a source of progress and healing. As an aspiring legal academic, I look forward to theorizing novel understandings of the law which embody this outlook and offer pathways toward a more just legal system.

“I am deeply grateful that I had the opportunity to participate in FASPE at such a pivotal moment in my legal education. I genuinely believe that the legal profession would be a better place if more attorneys could share in that experience.”

LaShyra “Lash” Nolen

2022 Medical Fellow

Lash is student council president for the class of 2023 at Harvard Medical School. She uses that platform as a medical student, writer, activist, and leader to promote health equity and antiracism in medical education. Very much to the point of our Ethical Consideration, please see this important piece that Lash wrote, published in the Boston Globe: “Woke medicine doesn’t mean worse medicine.”

Lash is an activist, not just a wordsmith: she founded We Got Us, a Boston-based grassroots student-led nonprofit that promotes health equity through access, education, and healing in communities of color. Over the past two years, the We Got Us team has created over 1,000 Covid vaccine appointments in addition to arranging services like acupuncture for hundreds of community members across Boston.

In Lash’s words: “Through my experiences caring for patients of various marginalized backgrounds, I realized that the healing power of medicine starts and ends with equitable policies. Therefore, I am now spending a year at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government as a Center for Public Leadership Fellow to obtain my master’s in public policy before I complete my final year of medical school.

My research and policy interests lie in the development of programs and policies to promote reparations for descendants of enslaved people to close health disparity gaps. I believe the creation of a more just world hinges on our courage to study and learn from the past—my experience with FASPE was critical to this formulation. Through difficult, yet inspiring, conversations with my FASPE co-fellows and faculty, my ethical framework for social justice became clearer. I am so thankful for this incredible program and all it has done to expand both my heart and mind as a future physician activist.”

Christian Einertson

2018 Seminary Fellow

Christian was recently ordained and installed as the head pastor of Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church in Farmington, Minnesota. Alongside his work as a parish pastor, he is pursuing his PhD in Doctrinal Theology at Concordia Seminary in Saint Louis, where he specializes in the theology of the Lutheran Confessions.

Christian writes: “One of the main challenges I personally faced during my FASPE experience was the question of whether Lutheran theology had any resources and precedents that would enable it to speak meaningfully of resistance to an unjust governmental authority such as the Third Reich.”

With his FASPE background, Christian has concentrated his study on issues of resistance within his theological tradition. He has since written an article describing the ways in which the Formula of Concord, one of the Lutheran Confessions, not only sanctions but even mandates individual and collective resistance against certain forms of tyranny, which he has submitted to the major academic journal of his synod for publication. The topic of resistance also features prominently in Hans Joachim Iwand on Church and Society: Opened by the Kingdom of God, a book of articles by a Lutheran theologian who resisted the Third Reich in the 1930s and 1940s, a text that Christian has recently translated for English-speaking audiences, to be published in early 2023.

“I thank FASPE for giving me the occasion to do this research and a desire to do more.”

Christian and his wife Kristen live in Farmington with their one-year-old son and look forward to welcoming their next child in January.

Joseph Scarpa

2018 Medical Fellow

Joseph Scarpa is a senior resident and Van Poznak Research Scholar in the Department of Anesthesiology at Weill Cornell, where he will be a liver transplantation fellow next year.

His research focuses on applications of genome sequencing and artificial intelligence to personalize treatment and improve outcomes for patients requiring high-risk surgery and intensive care. Some of this work includes the development of an “ambient intelligence” network of contactless sensors, like cameras, depth sensors, and acoustic sensors, that continuously monitors patients in the hospital and provides insights into how to better optimize their care. Joe received his MD/PhD from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

He is also a visiting research fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at Cambridge University, where he works on the sociopolitical impact of AI technologies, with a specific interest in how machines extend and modify human cognition.

Christine Henneberg MD MS

2012 Medical Fellow

Dr. Christine Henneberg is a family medicine physician who practices women's health and family planning, including providing first- and second-trimester abortions in California. 

Chrissy has been drawn to abortion care from the start of her medical training as a way to offer patients trust and compassion in an exquisitely tender and vulnerable moment in their lives. As she wrote recently in The New York Review of Books: "She came in for an abortion, and what she got instead, or first, was a glimpse of this: her agency; a vision of what her future will look like, even if it's just for the next few days, or the next week, or the next hour; her self."

Chrissy earned her BA in English / Creative Writing from Pomona College, and her MD / MS in Health Sciences from the UC Berkeley – UCSF Joint Medical Program. She attended residency at Contra Costa Regional Medical Center, where she established a resident scholarly track in the Medical Humanities. Her essays on abortion, reproductive justice, and other topics in medical ethics have appeared in The New York Times, Boston Review, The Point, Slate, and elsewhere. Her memoir, Boundless: An Abortion Doctor Becomes a Mother, will be published in September 2022.

Rev. Matt Stone

2017 Seminary Fellow

Rev. Matt Stone is the rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in Bastrop, Texas. He is leading this theologically and politically diverse community to engage in ethical issues including systemic racism, welcoming the marginalized, confronting our nation's epidemic of gun violence, and gathering faith leaders in the community to partner with Title I elementary schools. Calvary has also launched the Concerts at Calvary Series to bring in well-known musicians and songwriters to perform and discuss the intersection of spirituality and creativity.

Matt graduated with a diploma in Anglican Studies from Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, Texas, and received a Master of Theology from Dallas Theological Seminary. Matt has been married for almost 17 years and is the proud father of a son, Henry.

Matt writes: “During the pandemic and with the other difficult issues our country is facing, I have come back time and again to what we learned in FASPE. It is so tempting to stay quiet for the sake of the institutions we are part of, but it is such silence that allows injustice and oppression to go unnoticed and unchecked. While we want to avoid sorting ourselves and those we serve into boxes, we must call ourselves and others to make decisions and take steps to honor the dignity of every human being. For in the end, we really do belong to each other.”

Rose Carmen Goldberg

2014 Law Fellow

Rose Carmen Goldberg is a Deputy Attorney General at the Office of the California Attorney General, and lecturer at the UC Berkeley School of Law, where she serves as Director of the Veterans Law Practicum. In both roles, Rose leverages the power of the law to empower and protect the underrepresented

As a Deputy Attorney General, she litigates complex cases on behalf of her fellow Californians — cases that can affect millions of people. Currently, her work focuses on gun violence and the proliferation of ghost guns, and she recently led a successful suit against the federal administration that pushed for drastic reform of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program and relief for public servants nationwide.

At Berkeley Law, Rose draws on her years representing homeless and veterans within the criminal-legal system as a Skadden Fellow to teach the Veterans Law Practicum. Through the lens of veterans rights, she trains the next generation of lawyers how to use the law to combat some of the most important social justice issues of our time: sexual assault, racism, discrimination against LGBTQ individuals, and inadequate access to mental healthcare.

Rose is also active in advancing Native rights and visibility in her local community, including serving on the Advisory Board of the American Indian Cultural District of San Francisco and educating the public on California's genocide against Native Americans. Rose got her start in Native American affairs in the White House under President Obama.

Faina Rozental

2021 Business Fellow

Faina Rozental is a research analyst at Eventide Asset Management, a values-based investment advisory firm in Boston.

Prior to Eventide, Faina received her MBA with a focus on finance and sustainability from the MIT Sloan School of Management. Faina’s career in sustainable investing began at Root Capital, a non-profit impact investing organization that lends to small agricultural businesses across Latin America and Africa.

Born in Lviv, Ukraine, Faina is half Ukrainian-Jewish and half Russian, and has close ties to relatives in both countries. In addition to raising funds for humanitarian relief and elevating news about the war in her networks, Faina is helping her firm navigate values-based or ethical investing through the lens of war. Her recent piece, What the Russia-Ukraine Crisis Teaches Us About Investing with Our Values is geared toward Eventide clients, but speaks to the investor community more broadly.

Valerie Hopkins

2013 Journalism Fellow

Valerie Hopkins is the Moscow Correspondent for The New York Times. Valerie previously served as the South-East Europe Correspondent for the Financial Times, covering the region from Budapest. 

Her work has also appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Mother Jones, Politico Europe, and elsewhere.

She holds a BA in International Relations with a focus on Russian and Post-Soviet Studies from the College of William and Mary, and an MA in Political Journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Dr. William F. Parker, MD, PhD.

2010 Medical Fellow

Dr. Parker is a medical ethicist at UChicago Medicine who provides critical care and conducts research on medical scarcity. At the height of the COVID crisis, he was tasked with drafting the ventilator allocation plan for UChicago Medicine.

“My FASPE training and the FASPE network of professionals helped me draft an ethical protocol,” Dr. Parker explained. “I reached out to FASPE medical faculty member, Dr. Mark Mercurio, for insight. He was doing similar work as director of the Biomedical Ethics Program at the Yale School of Medicine.”

Dr. Parker’s most recent publication delves into caring for the unvaccinated. It is published in the Annals of the American Thoracic Society. He serves as both an Assistant Professor of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the University of Chicago Department of Medicine and Assistant Director of the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at UChicago Medicine.