Board of Directors
Steve Edwards is the chief content officer at WBEZ, Chicago’s NPR member station. He spent two decades covering politics and public policy as a journalist and program host of “The Afternoon Shift” and “Eight Forty-Eight.” Most recently, he served as the executive director of the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago.
Steve recommends Kicking the Pigeon. It's hard to identify an origin story for the Institute, but this series about the systematic police abuse of residents inside Chicago Public Housing high rises comes close. The investigation sparked a renewed public conversation in Chicago about police accountability and paved the way the release of the civilian complaint records that later became the basis of CPDP.
Sonny Garg (board chair) leads energy solutions at Uptake, an advanced analytics software team focused on the industrial Internet of Things. Prior to joining Uptake, Garg spent 13 years at Exelon Corporation, in a variety of senior executive positions, including chief information & innovation officer and President of Exelon Power. Garg also served as an assistant to Mayor Richard Daley and was appointed a White House Fellow by President Bill Clinton.
Sonny recommends Citizens Police Data Project (CPDP). The Invisible Institute's mission is to enhance the capacity of citizens to hold public institutions accountable. The Citizens Police Data Project (CPDP) is the first of kind online tool designed to provide essential information to better hold police accountable to the public they serve. CPDP takes records of police interactions with the public – records that would otherwise be buried in internal databases – and opens them up to make the data useful to the public, creating a permanent record for every CPD police officer.
WuDi Wu is a Partner at the Boston Consulting Group, specializing in private equity and consumer products. He has been involved with the Invisible Institute since 2014, helping with the Citizens Police Data Project and the Laquan McDonald shooting lawsuit. He also serves on the board of BCG's Center for Illinois' Future, helping lead their Violence Reduction projects.
Ronald Milsap is a director at BMO Harris Bank, where he leads a team responsible for a small-business lending program targeted at underserved borrowers. Ron is a native of the South Side of Chicago with nearly 20 years of experience in banking, with a focus in nonprofit organizations.
Kari Lydersen is an assistant professor at Medill and also co-director of the Social Justice News Nexus, a fellowship program at Medill that brings together graduate students and professional reporters to do in-depth stories on topics including drug policy, mental health and housing. Kari also works as a reporter, covering energy for Midwest Energy News and freelancing for other outlets including the BGA, The Washington Post, The Chicago Reporter and In These Times. Kari has also worked as a research associate at the Medill Watchdog Project at Northwestern, a staff writer in the Midwest bureau of the Washington Post; and wrote for the Chicago edition of the New York Times through the Chicago News Cooperative. Kari is deeply familiar with the Invisible Institute was a part of early brainstorming conversation that Jamie held as he was first thinking of starting the organization.
Kristian Lum is a research associate professor at the Data Science Institute at the University of Chicago. A statistician and machine learning researcher, she focuses on fairness, accountability and transparency. Kristian led criminal justice efforts at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) a longtime partner of the Invisible Institute. She has also spent time at Twitter, the University of Pennsylvania, and Virginia Tech. Kristian is a founding member of the Executive Committee of the ACM conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT) — the premier venue for work on the societal impacts of algorithmic systems — and was named an Emerging Leader in Statistics by the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies and a Kavli Fellow by the National Academy of Sciences.