Meet Our Talented Research Team
Dr. Brandon (Brad) Minnery is founder and CEO of Kairos Research. He has 20 years of experience leading applied cognitive science, neuroscience and artificial intelligence research within government, industry and academia, including roles as Principal Investigator or Co-Investigator on projects funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), Office of Naval Research, Army Research Office, and the Ohio Federal Research Network. Before starting Kairos Research, he was the Director of Research for the Wright State Research Institute in Dayton, OH. Prior to his time in academia, Dr. Minnery served as an IARPA Program Manager within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Prior to that, he worked in industry as a Lead Artificial Intelligence Engineer for the MITRE Corporation in McLean, VA. Dr. Minnery holds a Ph.D. in Neurobiology from the University of Pittsburgh and undergraduate degrees in Physics and English Literature from the University of Cincinnati.
Ebi Maki is co-founder and COO of Kairos Research. He has over 15 years of experience in diverse operations and finance roles. Before starting Kairos, he was Chief Financial Officer for the Wright State Research Institute in Dayton, OH. Prior to his time in academia and government contracting, Mr. Maki served as Finance Director of the Services Organization for Teradata Corporation. He holds an M.B.A. from the University of Dayton and a B.S. in Management Information Systems from Wright State University.
Dr. Widmer’s research expertise focuses on human cognition in human-machine teams. She has conducted human-computer interaction research in a variety of contexts, including geopolitical forecasting and medical decision making. Before joining Kairos Research, Dr. Widmer was a Judgment and Decision Making Research Scientist at the Wright State Research Institute, where she worked on projects for the U.S. Intelligence Community aimed at developing hybrid human-machine geopolitical forecasting systems. Prior to that, her graduate work involved adapting intelligent tutoring systems with natural language processing capabilities for use as medical decision aids. This work has been published in multiple academic journals, including Behavior Research Methods, Medical Decision Making, and Discourse Processes. Dr. Widmer received her Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Miami University (Oxford, OH), with undergraduate degrees in Psychology and English from the Ohio State University.
Mr. Nadella has more than 15 years of software engineering experience and has been actively involved in all aspects of the data analysis and software engineering life cycle ranging from requirements/data gathering and analysis (including data cleansing and visualization) to design and development of diverse software and data products. He also has extensive experience applying state-of-the-art machine learning approaches (such as deep neural networks and statistical natural language processing techniques) to analyze large-scale heterogenous datasets, including human cognitive and physiological performance data, geopolitical forecasting data, unstructured text corpora and social media data. Mr. Nadella holds a B.S. in Electronics and Communications Engineering from Visvesvaraya Technological University in India and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Wright State University.
Dr. Summerville is a leading expert on the interaction of emotion and cognition, with a focus on counterfactual reasoning. Before joining Kairos Research, Dr. Summerville was an Associate Professor at Miami University (Oxford, OH) for 11 years, where she was the Principal Investigator of a National Science Foundation grant focused on leveraging counterfactual thinking to improve student performance and director of a student research partnership with Procter & Gamble. She is a Fellow of the Society for Experimental Social Psychology and the Midwestern Psychological Association, a member of the editorial boards of several leading journals in social psychology, and the 2019 Program co-chair and 2022 Convention Chair for the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. Her more than 20 publications have been cited over 1300 times and have been featured by the New York Times Magazine, the BBC, and NPR. Dr. Summerville received her B.A. in Psychology, magna cum laude, from Amherst College, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Social Psychology, with a minor in Quantitative Psychology, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Dr. Welborn’s expertise is in social psychology and social cognitive neuroscience, with a particular focus on mentalizing and perception of collective attitudes. Before joining Kairos Research, Dr. Welborn was an Assistant Professor at the University of East Anglia, where he conducted behavioral and neuroimaging research, and supervised Ph.D., Master’s and undergraduate dissertations. His work has embraced a range of topics in social cognition, investigating person-specific mentalizing, the neural basis of the false consensus effect, processes underlying social influence in adolescence, selfish and altruistic patterns in moral decision making, and the effects of social stigma on the brain. Dr. Welborn received his B.A. in Cognitive Science, magna cum laude, from Yale University, and his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Welborn conducted post-doctoral work as a SAGE Junior Research Fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Dr. Martí is an expert in certainty, learning, and metacognition, with a focus on the drivers of human certainty, the propagation of misinformation and pseudoscience, and the diversity of human conceptual representations. Additionally, he has substantial experience with creating intuitive data visualizations, Bayesian data analyses, and implementing computational models from scratch. Dr. Martí has over 15 years of experience in quantitative/qualitative research and software development, and has independently led two first-authored publications in high-impact science journals which received international press. Before joining Kairos, Dr. Martí worked in a variety of roles including as a User Research Specialist at Microsoft, an MRI Tech at the University of Maryland, and a Lead Programmer at Gameloft. He received his Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, a Master's degree in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from the University of Rochester, and two B.S. degrees in Computer Science and Psychology from the University of Maryland, College Park.
Jason is a full-stack software engineer and an award-winning senior-level interactive developer with 10+ years of experience in branding and design, web development, and digital project management. Prior to joining Kairos, Jason led tech start-ups in the tourism and travel industry, managed international technical teams throughout Europe and Asia, and designed and developed custom e-commerce sites grossing $15M+ in annual revenue. He has extensive experience in designing, building, and maintaining enterprise-level web applications for some of the largest consumer brands in the world. Jason is a graduate of Cincinnati State's Graphic Design and Web Development programs, a background which reflects his dual passions for software development and visual design.
Dr. Tehran Davis is an authority in human perception, action, and movement coordination. Before joining Kairos Research, he held faculty appointments at the University of Connecticut and the University of Cincinnati, where his research focused on examining the perceptual and motor processes involved in the dynamic selection, control, and online coordination of goal-directed action in everyday tasks and environments. This includes specific interests in the coordination of multi-agent interactions ranging from one-on-one exchanges to the large-scale collective behaviors of teams. He has nearly fifteen years of experience in using motion capture, eye-tracking, and VR/AR technologies in research settings, and is an expert in non-linear time series analysis techniques for which he has served as an instructor for the American Psychological Association Training Institute. He received his B.A. and his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University of Cincinnati.
Dr. William Romine brings expertise in human performance measurement drawing upon traditions from the fields of psychometrics, text analytics, and physiological sensor-based measurement. Before coming to Kairos, Dr. Romine held faculty appointments at Wright State University and Missouri Valley College. During his time at Wright State, Dr. Romine founded and directed the Data Science for Education Laboratory which continually funded graduate student research tackling diverse problems in science education and public health through both statistical and machine learning approaches. Dr. Romine earned his PhD in Curriculum and Instruction and MS in Geological Sciences from University of Missouri, Columbia MO, and an MA in Education and a BA in Physics from Truman State University, Kirksville, MO.
Dr. Rajan Bhattacharyya is the Director of Research at Kairos. His experience includes leading cutting-edge cross-disciplinary research and development in human-machine teaming, autonomous systems, and AI. Dr. Bhattacharyya has served as Principal Investigator on numerous DoD and ODNI projects as a senior scientist, and roles as Intelligent Systems Lab director and manager of corporate partnerships, where he was responsible for technology roadmaps, project portfolios, and the maturation and transition of technologies into both commercial and government applications at HRL Laboratories. He has 55 awarded patents, and earned his Ph.D from Caltech in Computation and Neural Systems, and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley.