Meet Our Talented Research Team
Dr. Brandon (Brad) Minnery is founder and CEO of Kairos Research. He has over 15 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, where he held a joint appointment as Associate Professor of Psychiatry in Wright State University’s Boonshoft School of Medicine. 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.
Jeff Cail is Chief Client Officer of Kairos Research. Jeff’s expertise focuses on helping clients uncover deep human insights from the analysis of both structured and unstructured data. He has significant experience in the areas of Innovation, Customer Experience, Advertising Analytics, and Pricing research. Jeff has over 20 years of experience in Research and Analytics with a variety of Client and Management roles. Most recently Jeff was the Chief Operating Officer for Ipsos North American where he led several research and analytical business units. Prior to this Jeff held various roles at BASES, the world’s largest innovation and forecasting consultancy. At BASES he had significant roles in the Client Service, Analytical, and Model Development ranks. Jeff is a graduate of Miami University with degrees in Marketing and Decision Sciences. He has also attended Executive Education programs at Stanford and Duke 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 10 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. Fiechter is an expert in human learning and memory, metamemory, and crowd wisdom. He also has extensive experience with Bayesian data analyses—including multivariate, hierarchical linear and nonlinear models—as well as implementing computational models of human learning and decision-making. His findings have been published in top-tier journals, including Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, and Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. Prior to working at Kairos, he was employed as a contractor supporting the Air Force Research Laboratory, where he worked on computational models of memory, learner-adaptive training algorithms, and interventions designed to facilitate human-machine interaction. He holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology, and minor in Quantitative Psychology, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a B.A. in Psychology, with highest distinction, from Purdue University at Fort Wayne.
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.