A Meeting of the Minds in the Bay Area
Join University of Chicago President Paul Alivisatos, AB’81, to hear how Chicago Minds, the most ambitious campaign in University history, gives our community an opportunity to build on UChicago’s strength in educating great minds and advancing groundbreaking research, including our distinctive approach to artificial intelligence.
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Event details
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
6:00–8:15 p.m. (PDT)
Location
The Conservatory, One Sansome Street, San Francisco, California
This event is free of charge.
Questions? Contact alumni@uchicago.edu.
In the Bay Area, President Alivisatos will be joined in conversation with three faculty pioneers leading this work who will discuss scholarship and curricular innovation for this age of rapid technological transformation. They look forward to seeing you and sharing more about the University’s vision and the role you, our alumni and friends, play in bringing it to life.
James Evans
Department of Sociology
James Evans, Max Palevsky Professor in the Department of Sociology and faculty director of the master’s program in computational social science, is an expert on how collectives think, what they know, and how they could think better, with a special focus on understanding and improving innovation in science, technology, business, and society. His work uses large-scale data and machine learning to explore the emergence of ideas, shared patterns of reasoning, attention, communication, and certainty. Evans uses these patterns to build algorithms that think differently, complementing human collective reasoning by making inferences that humans could not. Evans is also the director of UChicago’s Knowledge Lab, focusing on using AI to understand and advance knowledge discovery. His research has been published in many journals, including Nature, Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
William H.J. Hubbard
University of Chicago Law School
William H.J. Hubbard, JD’00, AM’08, PhD’11, is the Clifton R. Musser Professor of Law and Economics at the University of Chicago Law School and a research professor at the American Bar Foundation. Trained at the University of Chicago as both a lawyer and an economist, Hubbard focuses his research and teaching on the study of courts, civil procedure, and the economic analysis of law. He is the author of the casebook Civil Procedure: An Integrated Approach (2021) and a coauthor of Court on Trial: A Data-Driven Account of the Supreme Court of India (2023). Hubbard currently serves as chair of the University of Chicago Faculty Committee for AI and Academic Life and the Law School AI Committee. He previously served as editor of The Journal of Legal Studies and deputy dean of the Law School. Prior to joining the UChicago faculty, Hubbard practiced law, specializing in electronic discovery and appellate advocacy.
Rebecca Willett
Statistics and Computer Science
Rebecca Willett is the Worah Family Professor of Statistics and Computer Science in the Wallman Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago. She is also the faculty director of AI at the University of Chicago Data Science Institute and holds a courtesy appointment at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago. Her research focuses on machine learning foundations, scientific machine learning, and signal processing. Willett received the inaugural SIAM Activity Group on Data Science Career Prize from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 2024, was named a fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 2021, and was named a fellow of the IEEE in 2022. She is the deputy director for research at the NSF-Simons National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology, deputy director for research at the NSF-Simons Institute for AI in the Sky (SkAI), and a member of the executive committee of the NSF’s Institute for Foundations of Data Science. She is also the faculty director of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellowship. She received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2007 and an Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Program award in 2010.