Team
Sudhir Venkatesh
William B. Ransford Professor of Sociology & African-American Studies
Faculty Director, SIGNAL: Tech & Leadership Lab
Sudhir Venkatesh is a sociologist and ethnographer whose work focuses on the social and behavioral dimensions of digital technologies, including platform governance, trust and safety operations, and related dynamics. His prior research spans urban poverty, violence, underground economies, and community organization, as well as ethnographies of advertising agencies, hedge funds, and government institutions.
He has held the William B. Ransford Professorship at Columbia University since 1999 and earned his PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago. He is the author of several acclaimed books, including Gang Leader for a Day, which received the Best Book recognition from The Economist and was selected by Mark Zuckerberg for his 2015 reading list.
His other appointments have included Head of Integrity Research at Facebook, Director of the Social Innovation Hub at Twitter, and Senior Advisor to the Office of the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He was elected a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University and received the National Science Foundation's CAREER Award.
He currently teaches courses on the technology sector and leads a popular undergraduate initiative examining the challenges of establishing a human settlement on Mars. He is also the host of Sudhir Breaks the Internet, a podcast from the Freakonomics Radio.
Maria Prudente
Associate Director, SIGNAL: Tech & Leadership Lab
Maria Prudente is a culture writer working at the intersection of AI, power, and storytelling. She has worked as an Editor and AI Analyst on Google AI special projects, where she trained and evaluated AI models with a focus on prompt engineering, chain of thought reasoning, and content generation, while minimizing hallucinations and ensuring factual accuracy. She was part of a small select team critiquing and analyzing AI-generated film and video.
Her reporting, personal essays, and criticism center on technology, women's issues, power dynamics, the creative arts, and whose stories get told. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Daily Beast, Salon, Observer, and the Chicago Tribune, among others. She has covered the unprecedented WGA/SAG-AFTRA Hollywood double strike, the collapse of American newsrooms, reproductive healthcare, the changing language of victimhood in the post-#MeToo era, and reported the first follow-up sexual assault allegation against actor Chris Noth after The Hollywood Reporter's initial story, helping to establish a pattern of allegations against him.
Trained in musical theatre and the Method, she has worked as an actor in film, television, and theatre for over a decade. She most recently served as casting director and co-starred in No Choice, a feature film about post-Roe America that won the 2025 Grand Jury Prize at LA's Dances With Films Independent Film Festival.
She holds an MA in Cultural Reporting and Criticism from New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and a BA in Nonfiction Creative Writing from Columbia University.