Meet the Fellows

Jason M. Chernesky (Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine) earned his PhD in the History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania. Chernesky is a historian of twentieth-century medicine, healthcare, public health, and environments in the United States. His research examines race-based health disparities among American children and their families in the context of the built environments in which they lived. His research interests also include histories of epidemic disease, drug use, biomedical technologies, and nursing. As the CLIR Opioid Industry Research Postdoctoral Fellow, Chernesky will be involved in the stewardship of public access and research into this growing digital archive co-curated by Johns Hopkins and UCSF.

Rachel Corbman (University of Toronto) is a postdoctoral fellow in community data at the University of Toronto, where she will participate in the intellectual life of the Critical Digital Humanities Initiative and teach in the iSchool. She received her PhD in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Stony Brook University in 2019. Her current project, “Conferencing on the Edge: A Queer History of Feminist Field Formation, 1969-1989,” is a history of the conflicts that shaped women’s studies and gay and lesbian studies in the 1970s and 1980s.

Taiwo Lasisi (Carnegie Mellon University) received her PhD in Public Administration and Policy from Old Dominion University. As a CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in Community Data Literacy at Carnegie Mellon University, her research called The “DaPGEF” Project focuses on exploring the use of “data visualization to assess the problematics of greenhouse emissions and flooding”, particularly in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She works with the Carnegie Mellon University Libraries, Sustainability Initiatives, and Center for Shared Prosperity to promote data literacy, management, and research on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and environmental justice issues.

Katie Mackinnon (University of Toronto) received her PhD in the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto in 2022. Her research focuses on histories of the web, including early uses and experiences of young people in the late 1990s. She interrogates ethical approaches to web archival research and youth data, and examines social, infrastructural, and policy issues of the web.

Heidi Nicholls (Johns Hopkins University) is a historical and political sociologist of empire, settler colonialism, and race. Nicholls completed a PhD at the University of Virginia. Her dissertation research analyzed how settler colonists employed notions of whiteness to maintain and extend the U.S. empire on the continent and across Oceania. As a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow with the Department of Sociology, Nicholls will work on projects directed by Black Beyond Data, including the risk and racism initiative, which focuses on the interconnections between colonization, racism, and the history of medicine.

Erin Yunes (Virginia Tech) is a CLIR post-doctoral fellow for the Rematriating Inuit Knowledges team. Dr. Yunes received her PhD at York University in Toronto, ON, Canada. Her doctoral work, titled Decolonizing Nunavut’s Art Market, explored how decolonizing and Indigenizing information and communication technologies in the Canadian Arctic strengthens Inuit engagement in rewriting a persistent colonial narrative of Arctic history and allows communities to control the dissemination of stories and traditional knowledge. Community ownership and control of broadband infrastructure and establishing equitable, affordable, and accessible ICT innovation reinforced by community-first strategic development policies support expansion in the Inuit art market in Nunavut.