Dr. Shiri Dori-Hacohen

[Image Description]: Professor Dori-Hacohen smiles at the camera in a professional headshot while seated and leaning an arm against their knee.

[Image Description]: Professor Dori-Hacohen smiles at the camera in a casual headshot. They have wire-rimmed glasses and long, wavy brown hair.

Meet Prof. Shiri Dori-Hacohen, Assistant Professor in the School of Computing at the University of Connecticut and Director of the RIET Lab!

Tell us about your work and research in STEM:

I am an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing at the University of Connecticut. I lead a lab called the Reducing Information Ecosystem Threats (RIET) Lab. My joke is that we study disinformation, so we’re always “right” (RIET). 

During my PhD, I founded AuCoDe, a startup that detects controversies automatically and turns them into actionable intelligence. This was in 2016, so right place at the right time, and I saw the world sliding into a place of more and more disinformation and discourse that wasn’t productive or civil. I ran AuCoDe for five years before joining UCon. 

In the lab that I direct, we have several projects that have to do with mis and disinformation, as well as bias and fairness in AI. One of the large projects that I’m helping manage is regarding disinformation and online harms to AAPI (Asian, Asian American, or Pacific Islander) communities. We are working in partnership with a lot of amazing community organizations which are seeing harmful content in their ecosystem, and they’re trying to combat it. We’re helping them build automated tools to do that. 

And the other project that I’m super proud of and that I’m the lead PI on is called Bias Reduction in Medical Information. The project is NSF-funded, and we are studying how bias in medical information propagates and spreads on social media and online. Talking about gender bias, sex bias, race, ethnicity, and, of course, ability and stigma are all things that are near and dear to the disability community’s heart. To me, as a disabled PI, it’s really meaningful to be able to work on these issues. We’ve pioneered an approach we call Fairness via AI. A lot of the work in AI fairness focuses on machine learning models and how to check whether they’re biased (and mitigate their bias). But for our project, we want to actually use AI to study and mitigate biases and inequities that already exist in society, and we think that’s going to be more effective.

What accessibility tools or tricks help you do your work?

I have had chronic pain for years, so have had a chance to develop quite a few systems that help me function significantly better than I would otherwise. Working from home obviously helps a LOT and I’m fortunate that I can do that in my role. I’m a petite woman at 5’2” - so I’ve always had a footrest underneath my chair because I usually can’t reach both the table and the floor at the same time. I also invested (being privileged enough to do so) in a really good ergonomic chair, and now I also have a standing desk. I bought it as a gift to myself after starting the tenure track position. I figured I had earned a better desk. I don’t use it as a standing desk nearly as often as I would like, because I don’t have the energy to actually stand, but even just having that ability is great. And because it’s hydraulic, I can even just stand up for a minute or two and then sit back down. I also have a heated shiatsu massager near my desk that I can run on my lower back at any time. It runs fairly quietly so I can have it on during virtual meetings. Microwaveable Heat packs are also great, gel or rice packs – I love long and narrow ones, wrap them in an XL thin scarf and tie it where I want it on my body. This can include placing it on my stomach for GI relief. The scarf can also double for a fashionable-looking neck heat pack on zoom. I love the ability to have my accommodations hiding in plain view sight - nobody needs to know but me! 

I also have a printer, and that’s really big for me. This connects strongly to the ableism-or-environmentalism debate, but I find that I do need to print out documents a lot. I can’t really read any length of thing on a computer. I have to read it on a physical piece of paper, and I’ve given myself full permission to do so, otherwise it’s not going to get done. But I do have a recycling bin, so all my paper ends up in recycling. And I reuse a lot of those papers, too; I’ve got two kids, so they’ll make artwork on whatever I’ve printed that isn’t double-sided. Recently I was able to purchase a Remarkable tablet and I really like it, so that might cut down on my paper consumption – the jury is still out.

One thing that I have (and that I’m really proud of) is my shelf system. I have a shelf on top of my standing desk, so it moves up and down with the desk, which is nifty. I have a lot of things that are easily accessible and within reach. I don’t have to go hunting for any of my files. I also have an in-tray system that I can access from where I’m sitting, or from across the room. I’m a ‘Getting Things Done’ adherent for years, although it is proving harder to maintain as a faculty member. Long before I was diagnosed with ADHD, I learned that this approach works really well for me to manage competing inputs. I have a slightly modified version of the original, because I have to pull out some high-priority, time-sensitive things, otherwise they’d never get done in time. This helps me keep my desk a little less cluttered (or a lot less cluttered, depending on the day!). I have a lot of storage space that I have tried to arrange as best I can despite my ADHD.

What do you want people to know about being disabled in STEM?

There is no one-size-fits-all for disabilities. But there are so few of us, that even “simple” visibility as a disabled person in STEM is a form of advocacy. So many of us are toiling in invisibility, and then being ignored even if we are visible -- not all disabilities are visible to begin with, so bringing a spotlight to it is super important and not easy. At least sexism and racism today are frowned upon in a very clear way, but ableism - people are just so blasé with it, and unaware that they are remotely being hurtful and harmful. Disclosure is not easy at first, and there are definitely downsides to disclosure especially if your position is not secure. But now that I openly identify as disabled, I have gotten less and less apologetic and more matter-of-fact about it. I find that most people are really great about it once you speak up, but also fairly clueless, to be honest, about the challenges and what it takes to succeed in an intensely ableist environment. People who are otherwise very committed to other DEI causes may know very little about ableism in academia, the difficulty of securing reasonable accommodations, and how hard it is to succeed while disabled or ill.  

What advice would you give to your younger self, or someone new to their disability journey?

Know your legal rights! I did not know about my ADA rights until pretty recently. 

I’ve carried so much internalized ableism around with me for years and years, up until I became comfortable with my disabled identity during the COVID lockdown era. The painful conversations around eugenics, resource limitations (e.g. ventilators) and triaging pushed me into learning more about the topic - and it was so revealing. I spent years struggling with trying to fit my disabled peg into the abled-bodied holes and failing in various ways: Not understanding that things like being under- or unemployed were not my fault, and that they were actually quite typical. Not understanding that the ableism that I faced, both from within and without, was not something that was ever within my control. 

We need some sort of education on this: intro to disability solidarity! I think that even when I was very very sick, I had so much internalized ableism about why I should continue to try to pretend to be healthy, or pass as healthy. Why I should refrain from disclosing. Some of which are very reasonable: I was worried about retaliation. But at the same time, that was preventing me from accessing resources even when I knew that they existed. As a PhD student, I never reached out to the center for students with disabilities at my university, because at the time I didn’t like the idea of thinking of myself as disabled… I was “just ill”. Just really sick, but not disabled, per se. Today I can proudly wear the disabled label, but I also understand that isn’t super easy. It took me years to get here, and I was well into my 30s before I came to terms with the fact that I had been disabled since birth.

We need a way of inviting people who identify in other ways (spoonie, chronically ill) to just explore it in a safe space where they won’t be judged. I think it’s a really uncomfortable thing for a lot of people - sadly. It shouldn’t be like that. In the same way, I think being LGBTQIA has become a reclaimed identity. You can say ‘queer’, when that used to be an insult. The idea of identifying as ‘crip’ is still uncomfortable for me, but it’s something I’m inching closer towards. And I do now have the disabled emoji on my Twitter, in part because, even though I don’t use mobility aids, I now definitely identify as disabled, even if you might not notice it looking at me or just passing me by in the street. That doesn’t make me any less disabled.

What was your journey like towards being a PI (primary investigator)?

I have multiple chronic illnesses. I was born with congenital birth defects, I’ve had illnesses since I was a very young baby - a pretty long laundry list of them! Some of them are changing even as we speak, I’m in diagnostic processes. I had a very lengthy misdiagnosis with fibromyalgia, which is now being discovered to be most likely Ehlers Danlos syndrome, and I was recently diagnosed with MCAS. I have migraines, TMJ, also asthma and severe eczema, that was my main medical issue from age 8 months to 26ish years, which included two lengthy hospitalizations in a dermatology ward in my mid 20s. Not exactly your canonical disability story, but in other ways, so very typical. 

I’ve been told by other disabled (and nondisabled) people that I’m this rare unicorn, to be a disabled PI. I want to take a moment to acknowledge that I’ve been very privileged to reach this level of attainment, and to have relatively secure employment compared to most of my disabled brethren. This happened in part because I came from a family of academics, and married an academic, and– to be totally honest– I was bankrolled by my academic spouse for a large part of my adult life. That allowed me to pursue the PhD at my own pace (slowly!), run a startup that made little money in its early stages, and then go on the academic job market; all in a way that is not realistically feasible for so many other disabled people. That doesn’t mean I didn’t work hard to get here; of course I did, there’s no way I could have made it here without hard work. But so many other disabled people have worked as hard as I have, if not more, but were unable to reach these levels of educational and employment attainment due to the ableism in our society, and are under- or unemployed. Many are living in poverty. As much as I want to use my platform for good, I think it’s really important to acknowledge the comparative privileges that have allowed me to get this far.

I have also been fortunate in terms of funding, I’ve been a PI and Co-PI on 7.7 million dollars from the National Science Foundation. I take a distinct amount of pride in that despite all the barriers. I was incredibly honored to be named to the D-30 Disability Impact List in 2023 alongside 29 other amazing disabled peers, plus disability legend Judith Heumann.