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Nick Obradovich is Chief Scientist for Environmental Mental Health at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research. He previously worked as Chief Scientist for Project Regeneration, as Senior Research Scientist and Principal Investigator at the Max Planck Society, and as Research Scientist at the MIT Media Lab. He holds a PhD from the University of California, San Diego and completed his postdoctoral training at Harvard University’s Kennedy School. He is also a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Tulsa and a Research Affiliate with the MIT Sustainable Urbanization Lab.
Nick’s research combines his interests in artificial intelligence, climate change, and human behavior with his affinity for data science and computational methods. His work regularly appears in top academic journals and in major media outlets.
Nick’s climate research explores the human impacts of warming. He has uncovered climatic effects on mental health [2][3], mobility, sentiment [2][3][4], physical activity [2], and sleep [2] as well as daily governance, democratic turnover, and civil conflict. He has also studied climate-related political behaviors, attitudes, and adaptation of expectations as well as the use of social media data to assess disaster damage and flood incidence.
Another line of Nick’s research explores the intersection of humans and machines. He has investigated the effects that generative algorithms might have on emotions — good and bad — and has examined easing the study of algorithmic output [2]. He has studied algorithmic bias [2], the detection of manipulated media, the use of large language models in psychiatry [2], and the ways algorithms can enable the study of culture. And he has investigated how to study machine behavior [2][3].