Columbia College, Columbia University, 2024
Major: Political Science and Computer Science-Physics
Language: German, Turkish (native); English, French (fluent); Spanish (beginner)
Computer Skills: Microsoft and Google Suite, Python, Java (intermediate); Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning in Python (low intermediate); MATLAB, MySQL, SQL, R (beginner)
Email: laura.messner@columbia.edu
Laura Messner is a first-year student from Istanbul, Turkey studying at Columbia University and intending to major in Political Science and Computer Science-Physics. Laura has been at TTCSP since February; first as a Research Intern for the Western Europe Team and a member of the Technical Team, then as the Science & Technology Project Lead. She is currently continuing to lead the Science & Technology Team to prepare for the Science & Technology workshop in June along with leading TTCSP's research teams as Research Coordinator.
Laura’s main interests include, but are not limited to, legal and political theory and disruptive technologies' impact on our legal and political systems. Laura is a Research Assistant at the Legal Priorities Project, where she is conducting research on legal theory and how changes in legal norms and values are affected and shaped by the longterm challenges of Artificial Intelligence to judicial decision-making. She has also been a Research Assistant at AlQuraishi Lab through a partnership between Harvard Medical School and Columbia University Irving Medical Center, where she is researching protein geometry under the guidance of a senior research fellow at Harvard Medical School. Laura has two international short screenplay writing and filmmaking awards from Portugal, and two national scholastic writing awards from Turkey for which her literary criticism essays were featured in anthologies. At Columbia, she is a member of the First-Generation College Student Advisory Board, editor for the Journal of Politics and Society, and writer for the Columbia Undergraduate Law Review.
In the future, Laura wants to be involved in an interdisciplinary field where she can combine her passions in the social, natural, and applied sciences. In her free time, she loves reading Foucault, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky.