Postdoctoral Scholars and Researchers

Paul Linton is a neuroscientist and philosopher specializing in 3D vision. He received his PhD in 2021 from the Centre for Applied Vision Research, City, University of London, where his research challenged our understanding of distance perception by showing the visual system is unable to triangulate distance using the two eyes. He was also part of the DeepFocus team at Meta Reality Labs. Paul is the author of The Perception and Cognition of Visual Space (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Before vision science, he was a stipendiary lecturer in law at St Hilda’s College, Oxford University, and a teaching fellow in philosophy at University College London. As a Presidential Scholar, Paul will develop his new two-stage theory of 3D vision using the latest techniques in machine learning and fMRI in the hope of explaining how we experience the 3D world. 

Paul Linton is a Nomis Fellow of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University. 

Project Title: New Approaches to 3D Vision

Nedah Nemati researches the role of lived experience in neuroscientific experimentation and the influence of such experience in characterizing behavioral and cognitive concepts. Her doctoral work parlayed this interest into an examination of how behavioral neurobiologists have drawn from many kinds of experiences to develop and understand the concept of ‘sleep’. This scholarship is informed by Nedah’s prior laboratory research on the relationship between circadian rhythms and addiction in rodents at the University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC), and on sleep deprivation and death in Drosophila melanogaster (common fruit fly) at Harvard Medical School. She received philosophical training at Millsaps College (BSc), earned her MSc in biological sciences at UMMC, and will defend her PhD in history and philosophy of science from the University of Pittsburgh in May 2022.   

As a Presidential Scholar, Nedah will draw from historical and phenomenological traditions to characterize an account of lived experience in neuroscience and to develop a philosophy and science of behavior in neuroscience - one that includes what should count as a behavior. Her investigations reflect a longstanding interest in the potential and limitations of using neuroscience to impart information about the mind. By characterizing the role of lived experience in scientific practices, Nedah’s project will aim to impart greater clarity in scientific uses of behavioral concepts and their clinical translation. Her interests also include the use of AI in neuroscience, intersections of neuroscience and medicine, interrogating the aims of science, and the metaphysics of science.  

Project Title: Moving from Flies to Frogs: Understanding Behavior through Lived Experience 

Natalia Pasternak is a microbiologist, with a PhD and post-doctorate in Microbiology, in the field of Bacterial Genetics at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. She is the former director in Brazil of the international festival of scientific communication “Pint of Science," columnist for the Brazilian national newspaper "O Globo", for the Skeptic magazine, and former columnist for Medscape. She also hosts two weekly radio shows “The hour of Science” at Brazil's CBN national radio station. She is a professor at the Public Administration School at Fundação Getúlio Vargas, São Paulo, and a research collaborator at the University of São Paulo, in the Vaccine Development Laboratory, Biomedical Sciences Institute. She is currently the publisher of Question of Science magazine and president of Question of Science Institute, the first Brazilian Institute for the promotion of skepticism and rational thinking. She is the first Brazilian to become a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry in recognition of outstanding work in the promotion of science, skepticism and critical thinking. In 2020, and again in 2021, she was chosen Brazilian of the year in Science by IstoE Magazine. She was chosen Personality of the year by the Group of Latin America Daily Newspapers, and received the Ockham Award from The Skeptic magazine, for the promotion of skepticism and rational thinking in Brazil. 

She has written three books on popularization of science, Science in our daily lives, which won Brazil's National Literature prize for best science book in 2021, Against Reality: science denialism, its causes and consequences, and Such Nonsense, pseudosciences and other crazy allegations that should not be taken seriously, the last one became a best-seller a month after the launch, reaching number 1 in the non-fiction category in all major book sales lists in Brazil. She was the only Brazilian listed by BBC as the 100 most influential women of 2021, at the Jerusalem Post as one of the 50 most influential Jews in the world in 2022, she won the Balles Prize for the promotion of critical thinking in 2022, and she is currently an Adjunct Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Science and Society and an Adjunct Professor at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs at Columbia University, where she teaches on the use of science for policy making. Her research focuses on how to improve science communication, vaccine uptake and combat denialism and misinformation, bringing scientific thinking for future policy makers, and helping to create an international collaboration for science-based global policies. 

Madi Whitman is the director of undergraduate studies and assistant director of curriculum development in the Center for Science and Society and a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology. As a sociocultural anthropologist and science and technology studies (STS) researcher, Madi studies how technologies, institutions, and subjectivities are made together. This research is currently animated by questions about surveillance and marginality in changing regimes of data collection in higher education in the United States.

Madi’s pedagogical work includes supporting interdisciplinary co-teaching at Columbia, developing curricula in science and society, and investigating the landscape of STS education in the U.S. Prior to coming to Columbia, Madi was involved in collaborations with the National Science Foundation Center for Science of Information in creating critical data modules for students. Madi earned a PhD in anthropology from Purdue University in 2020, completed a BA in anthropology at the University of North Dakota, and was previously a Visiting Research Fellow in the Program on Science, Technology and Society at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

Hadeel Assali is an anthropologist and former engineer whose work looks at the ongoing colonial legacies of the discipline of geology as well as anti-colonial ways of knowing and relating to the earth in southern Palestine. She received her PhD in Anthropology in 2021 from Columbia University, where her research looked specifically at the development of geology in Britain and how it was exported to the colonies for extraction, mapping, and eventual state-making technologies. More broadly, she examines the narratives deployed to produce space(s) and how they become imbued with the authority to do so. She will be running the “Race, Climate Change, and Environmental Justice” seminar, which was founded by earth science graduate students, with the goal of exploring ways of decolonizing the earth sciences. She is also a filmmaker and writer whose work draws heavily from her family stories based in Gaza, Palestine. Her new research seeks to focus on waterways and the colonial legacies access to, relations with, and knowledge of them.

Prior to her anthropological training, Hadeel was trained as a chemical engineer at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign and in a joint MS program with the National University of Singapore. Her nearly ten years of experience with a major oil company, several of which were as a project manager for environmental remediation projects, have largely informed the direction of her research. After receiving her PhD from Columbia, she was an ACLS Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania (2021-2022), where she worked on developing her dissertation into a book manuscript, which she plan to continue developing while back at Columbia University. 

This postdoctoral position is supported by a grant from the Arts & Sciences’ Graduate Equity Initiative.