ABOUT ME

Hi, I am Juniper Lovato I am an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Vermont and a member of the Vermont Complex Systems Institute.

My Research Labs: Computational Ethics Lab

Current Boards: Network Science Society, MAKE Santa Fe, US Northeast Chapter of the Complex Systems Society,

BIO

Juniper Lovato is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Vermont and a member of the Vermont Complex Systems Center, where she leads the Computational Ethics Lab. Her research spans the ethics and governance of data, AI, and technology, with a focus on fairness, accountability, transparency, and the science of stories. Drawing on methods from computational social science, natural language processing, network science, and complex systems, she studies how sociotechnical systems, composed of humans and technologies, mutually shape one another, influencing human values, institutions, and narratives.

Juniper is a Co-Principal Investigator of the NSF EPSCoR Track-1 award, The Science of Online Corpora, Knowledge, and Stories (SOCKS), which investigates how stories propagate and evolve in online environments. She is also the Principal Investigator of VERSO, an Open Source Program Office at UVM funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, dedicated to advancing open-source ecosystems and research software sustainability.

She earned her Ph.D. in Complex Systems and Data Science from the University of Vermont and her Master of Arts in Liberal Arts (Western Classics and Ethical Philosophy) from St. John’s College. Before joining UVM’s faculty, she served as Director of Education at the Santa Fe Institute, where she developed interdisciplinary education programs bridging science, computation, and the humanities.

Beyond her academic research, Juniper is deeply engaged in broadening participation in computer science and complex systems education. She is the inaugural Vermont regional partner for Code.org, co-founded the Vermont Computer Science Alliance, and helped establish UVM’s new Computer Science licensure degree for K–12 teachers, launching in Fall 2024. She serves on the boards of the Network Science Society and the Northeast Chapter of the Complex Systems Society, and is the founder of Make Santa Fe, a community makerspace. To date, she has created and led more than 80 STEM education programs worldwide, fostering accessible, interdisciplinary approaches to computing and complexity science.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Current research interests: ethics, fairness, accountability, and transparency, privacy, the science of stories, computational social science, complex systems, networks, computer science, data science, and open source

Current research projects: Ethics in AI-generated art models and LLMs, ethics of generative AI in education, wearables, distributed consent, privacy policies, the science of stories, narrative bias, data sharing practices, data ethics for data science, open source ecosystems, data sovereignty, and deepfakes as diverse misinformation.

consulting services

Data science and data ethics consulting services through Data Luminosity LLC. Please get in touch with me directly for inquiries.

CONTACT

Address: Juniper Lovato, University of Vermont, Office 405 Innovation Hall, 82 University Pl, Burlington, VT 05405

Email: juniper.lovato ‘at’ uvm dot edu

Google Scholar Profile