By Tom Fleischman
Nicola Dell, associate professor of information science at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech, has been awarded a 2024 MacArthur Foundation fellowship for her work developing technology interventions to address the needs of overlooked populations, including home health care aides and survivors of intimate partner violence.
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced the awards on Oct. 1. Each of this year’s recipients will receive a no-strings-attached award of $800,000 over five years – known as the “genius grant” – to use however they wish.
“It’s a huge vote of confidence in the work we do and in the importance of doing this kind of work,” said Dell, also a faculty member in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. “And hopefully, it’s motivation to keep going and keep focusing on these kinds of topics and these communities.”
Novelist Ling Ma, MFA ’15, was also among the 2024 MacArthur recipients.
Dell’s research focuses on designing and building novel computing systems that improve the lives of underserved populations, including survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV) and home health care workers. She co-founded the Clinic to End Tech Abuse at Cornell Tech to translate her research into practice and support IPV survivors through one-on-one security consultations. Dell also advises tech companies about risks posed by frequently exploited products, and her research has informed legislation to ensure more robust protections against tech abuse.
“All of us at Cornell Tech congratulate Nicki Dell on this well-deserved honor,” said Greg Morrisett, the Jack and Rilla Neafsey Dean and Vice Provost of Cornell Tech. “By addressing the widespread issue of technology abuse, Nicki has dedicated her career to helping vulnerable communities. Nicki is an inspiration to her students, her colleagues and to the many victims and survivors of abuse whose lives she has touched. It brings us all great pride to learn that she has received this fellowship in recognition of her work’s transformative impact.”
Abusers often exploit technology to surveil, threaten, impersonate or harass their targets; Dell conducted qualitative studies of survivor experiences through a partnership with the New York City Mayor’s Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence.
To investigate the tactics used by abusers, Dell and her collaborators also analyzed hundreds of posts in public online forums where potential perpetrators discuss strategies and spyware for surveilling their partners.
“We started out doing this sort of qualitative work to really just understand what people are experiencing,” Dell said. “Very quickly, the picture that emerged was devastating for survivors – that they were experiencing huge amounts of complex and persistent abuse, but really had nowhere to go.”
Exploring this problem exposed flaws in conventional security threat models, which are designed to guard against technologically sophisticated and distant adversaries, such as governments, and contributed new frameworks for security and privacy research to address closer, more personal types of threats.
“The analogy we draw is very much to things like health clinics, where if you have health problems, you can go and get help from a doctor, or if your car breaks down, you can go to a mechanic,” she said. “These survivors were trying to go to existing social services, or to law enforcement or to tech companies, and were really just getting no help.”
Dell also investigates how technology could improve patient outcomes and working conditions for home health care workers.
These essential caregivers are often among the most isolated and under-resourced workers in health care. Dell, director of technological innovation for the Initiative on Home Care Work, and her group explore the benefits of computer-mediated peer support programs, technologies to better integrate home health aides in the health care team and access to electronic training resources.
“There’s a huge need to try and improve the working conditions for these workers,” she said, “so that we can treat them with the respect and recognition they deserve, attract more people to the profession and, ultimately, make sure that folks are getting the care that they need to be able to age at home.”
A member of the Cornell Tech faculty since 2016, Dell is also a faculty affiliate of the Center for Applied Research on Work in the ILR School. Dell was the recipient of a 2018 National Science Foundation Faculty Early-Career Development Award and a 2023 SIGCHI Societal Impact Award.
Born in Zimbabwe, Dell received her bachelor’s in computer science from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, in 2004. She received her master’s (2011) and Ph.D. (2015) from the University of Washington.
Ma, who has taught creative writing and English at Cornell and at the University of Chicago, is the author of “Severance” (2018), an “apocalyptic office novel,” as she called it, about a pandemic in 2018 that eerily foreshadowed how the COVID-19 pandemic would empty offices and depopulate campuses.
She is also the author of 2022’s “Bliss Montage,” a collection of stories that blur genre distinctions and explore characters’ attempts to understand and be understood by others.
Ma received her bachelor’s in 2005 from the University of Chicago, where she will rejoin the faculty in 2025 as an associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature.
Other Cornell professors to have won MacArthur Foundation fellowships include Deborah Estrin, computer science, Cornell Tech (2018); Will Dichtel, chemistry and biochemistry (2015); Craig Fennie, applied and engineering physics (2013); Jon Kleinberg, computer science (2005) and Paul Ginsparg, physics and computer science (2002).
Additionally, plant geneticist Barbara McClintock, Class of 1923, M.A. ’25, Ph.D. ’27, was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1981, the first year of the grants.
Tom Fleischman is a writer for the Cornell Chronicle.
