By Grace Stanley
Seven new faculty members have joined Cornell Tech, each bringing visionary research and interdisciplinary expertise to its academic community. These scholars are blurring the lines between disciplines — from AI that sees and hears like a human, to video games that teach ecological thinking.
With three Sloan Fellows, three NSF CAREER Award winners, and a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree among them, this year’s new faculty cohort arrives with notable accolades and ambitions. Their work spans digital media, AI, robotics, and optimization, earning national recognition for pushing the boundaries of what technology can do.
“We are incredibly fortunate to welcome these extraordinary scholars to Cornell Tech. They’re not just some of the greatest minds advancing global research, they’re also building tools that change how we live, move, and connect,” said Greg Morrisett, Jack and Rilla Neafsey Dean and Vice Provost of Cornell Tech. “Each brings a distinct lens to the future of technology — whether through sound and vision, play and storytelling, or ethics and algorithms — that will enrich our thriving academic community.”
This year’s faculty cohort arrives at a pivotal moment in Cornell Tech’s evolution. Over the past decade, the campus has grown into a thriving hub for graduate education, research, and entrepreneurship. With more than 700 students and now more than 50 full-time faculty, Cornell Tech continues to expand its academic offerings, including new degree programs in data science and design tech.
Six of the new faculty members arrive on the Cornell Tech campus this semester, with one more coming in Summer 2026. Read more about their accomplishments below.
Meet the New Faculty at Cornell Tech
Allison Koenecke
Assistant professor of information science at Cornell Tech and the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science
Koenecke’s research on algorithmic fairness applies machine learning and causal inference to study societal inequities in various domains, from online services to public health. Koenecke previously held a postdoctoral researcher role at Microsoft Research and received her Ph.D. from Stanford’s Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering. She is the recipient of several NSF grants and a Cornell CIS DEIB Faculty of the Year Award, and has been honored as a Sloan Fellow in Computer Science and a Forbes 30 Under 30 recipient. Her work has been published in Nature, PNAS, NeurIPS, and FAccT.
Andrew Owens
Associate professor of computer science at Cornell Tech and the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science
In his research, Owens creates multimodal systems that learn to see, hear, and touch without human-labeled training data. These systems learn from co-occurring sensory signals, such as the correlations between the visual and audio streams of a video. His work has enabled applications including soundtracks for silent videos, robotic manipulation with vision and touch, detecting AI-generated images, and generating visual illusions. Owens is a recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship and an NSF CAREER Award.
Angelina Wang
Assistant professor of information science at Cornell Tech and the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science
Wang’s research focuses on responsible AI, including the societal impacts of AI systems and fairness beyond one-size-fits-all metrics. Wang has been recognized by the NSF GRFP, the EECS Rising Stars, the Siebel Scholarship, the Microsoft AI & Society Fellowship, and the ACL Best Paper award, with her work featured in outlets like MIT Technology Review and the Washington Post. She publishes across top venues in machine learning and responsible computing. She previously held a postdoctoral position at Stanford University after earning her Ph.D. from Princeton University and B.S. from the University of California, Berkeley.
José Sánchez
Associate professor of design tech at Cornell Tech and the Cornell College of Architecture, Art, and Planning
An architect, game designer, and media artist, Sánchez directs the Plethora Project, a research studio exploring the future of architectural design knowledge. He created the video games “Block’hood” and “Common’hood” to make architectural and ecological thinking accessible to broader audiences, and authored the book “Architecture for the Commons.” His interactive installation “Bloom” was featured during the 2012 London Olympics. Sánchez has taught at institutions across the U.S. and Europe, and his new research initiative at Cornell Tech, “Mediated Assemblies,” investigates simulation and interactive media as collaborative design tools.
Max Kreminski (starting Fall 2026)
Assistant professor of design tech at Cornell Tech and the Cornell College of Architecture, Art, and Planning
Kreminski is a human-computer interaction researcher focused on designing expressive and approachable computational systems to support creative work and play. Their research has been featured in outlets such as The New Yorker, New Scientist, and The Verge; published and exhibited at top HCI and AI conferences, including CHI, UIST, and NeurIPS; and honored with a variety of awards, including the Best Paper award at the ACM Conference on Creativity & Cognition. Kreminski currently directs the Storytelling Lab at Midjourney and previously served as an assistant professor at Santa Clara University.
Tianyi Chen
Associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Cornell Tech and Cornell Engineering
Chen’s research focuses on the theoretical foundations and algorithmic design of multi-objective optimization and learning, with applications to generative AI and emerging computing paradigms such as distributed and analog computing. Chen is the recipient of the inaugural IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Ph.D. Dissertation Award in 2020 and the NSF CAREER Award in 2021. His research has also been recognized with the Amazon Research Award, the Cisco Research Award, the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) Best Student Paper Award, and the IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award.
Wen Sun
Assistant professor of computer science at Cornell Tech and the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science
Sun’s research focuses on machine learning, particularly reinforcement learning and its applications to generative AI and robotics. He leads a research group developing algorithms for real-world decision-making. Sun has received an NSF CAREER award on enabling real-world reinforcement learning, a Sloan Research Fellowship in computer science, and an Ann S. Bowers Research Excellence Award. Prior to Cornell, Sun was a post-doctoral researcher at Microsoft Research in New York City and earned his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute.
New Design Tech Faculty
In addition to Sanchez and Kreminski, new design tech faculty based at Cornell Tech, the Department of Design Tech has also welcomed three additional new faculty based in Ithaca: Marirena Kladeftira, James Weaver, and Amira Abdel-Rahman.
Now entering its second year, this multicollege initiative — uniting Cornell Tech with Ithaca-based scholars in architecture, engineering, human ecology, and computing and information science — is deepening the connection between design innovation and emerging technologies.
Grace Stanley is the staff writer-editor for Cornell Tech.
