Burlington, VT Advisory Committee

Nick Cheney is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Core Faculty in Complex Systems & Data Science at the University of Vermont. He directs the UVM Neurobotics Lab that investigates adaptive, robust, and open-ended machine learning methods for deep neural networks and robotics.

He has been involved in $54M in funded research from sources including the NSF, DARPA, Army, USDA, NIH, NASA, Google, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation — leading 14 awards for $15M as PI/Co-PI, including an NSF CAREER award.  Nick is also the recipient of the ACM SIGEVO Impact Award for seminal contributions to the field of Evolutionary Computation, the International Society for Artificial Life's Outstanding Publication of the Year Award, the UVM Provost’s Awards for Excellence in Doctoral Mentoring, and the UVM Inventor Hall of Fame Award for success in research commercialization.  His scientific communication videos have over 1 million views, and his work has been highlighted in media outlets like Wired, Popular Science, and TED.  

Chris Danforth is a Professor of Mathematics & Statistics at the University of Vermont. He directs the Vermont Advanced Computing Center, and along with Peter Sheridan Dodds runs the Computational Story Lab research group at the Vermont Complex Systems Institute. He received a B.S. in Mathematics & Physics from Bates College in 2001, and a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics & Scientific Computation from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2006. He is the co-inventor of http://hedonometer.org, a socio-technical instrument estimating daily happiness based on social media, and has also developed algorithms to identify predictors of depression from Instagram photos. Danforth also leads the Lived Experiences Measured Using Rings Study, a longitudinal experiment incentivizing wellbeing using the Oura ring.

His work has received $40M in funding from MassMutual, NSF, NIH, NASA, NOAA, DARPA, DOE, and the MITRE Corporation. Danforth has co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications applying mathematical techniques to many fields including atmospheric science, linguistics, psychology, literature, finance, physics, engineering, and biochemistry. He received the Kroepsch-Maurice Excellence in Teaching Award in 2022, and the University Scholar Award in 2024. Danforth has advised over 50 research dissertations including 20 PhD students, 20 MS students, and 15 undergraduate thesis students. Descriptions of his projects are available at his website: http://uvm.edu/~cdanfort

Peter Sheridan Dodds is a Professor at the University of Vermont (UVM) and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Dodds works on system-level problems in many fields, ranging from sociology to physics, maintaining general research and teaching interests in complex systems with a focus on sociotechnical and psychological phenomena including contagion, risk, language, meaning, and stories. He is the Director of the Vermont Complex Systems Institute, co-Director of the Computational Story Lab, and a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science. His methods have encompassed large-scale data collection and analysis, large-scale sociotechnical experiments, building measuring instruments for data-rich complex systems, and the formulation, analysis, and simulation of theoretical models.

Dodds has received funding from NSF, NASA, ONR, the MITRE Corporation, MassMutual, and Google, and was awarded an NSF CAREER grant by the Social and Economic Sciences Directorate. Dodds created and has continually evolved Principles of Complex Systems, a two-semester graduate course that is freely and fully online. At UVM, Dodds has led the organic development of a highly successful, scaffolded graduate program in Complex Systems and Data Science.