Kristen Nixon

About Kristen Nixon

Kristen is a PhD student of the Department of Civil and Systems Engineering (CaSE), in the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE). Her research interests include pandemic response systems, science communication and translation, and leveraging modeling tools to study social media data for public health applications. To support COVID-19 response, she worked on projects to contribute weekly predictions to the CDC COVID-19 Forecasting Hub, complete a literature review on COVID-19 modeling with a focus on aspects of models that are crucial for successful translation to inform public health practice, and conduct a survey to understand the extent to which COVID-19 data and modeling informed decision-makers and how to build stronger data-driven pandemic response systems. She is currently working on a project to leverage LLMs to extract information from Reddit data about use and access channels of GLP-1 medications that is unavailable elsewhere and can inform regulatory actions to protect consumers.

As part of the HEART/HEROIC program, she taught a 1-credit course for engineering freshman focused on uncovering the social impacts and ethical questions that are inherent in engineering applications, and a 2-credit course for upperclassmen of all majors on data and AI ethics and social impact.

She is passionate about interrogating the social impacts and ethics of AI and figuring out how to harness these tools to contribute to social good. She hopes to work in data journalism after graduation.