SEPTEMBER 4, 2025, NEW YORK, NEW YORK — Heterodox Academy (HxA), a non-partisan, non-profit membership organization committed to improving institutions of higher education by advocating principles of open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement, welcomed its 2025-26 Fellows to the Segal Center for Academic Pluralism in New York City this week. 

Jill Cermele, Simon Cullen, and Michael Strambler are joining the Segal Center as Faculty Fellows with Jeffrey Martin beginning his tenure in January 2026. Kyle Siler will be a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Segal Center, joining Eric Torres who is returning as a Postdoctoral Fellow this year. 

"We are thrilled to welcome this outstanding group of fellows to the Segal Center. Each brings deep expertise, fresh perspectives, and a commitment to advancing open inquiry in the academy, said HxA President John Tomasi. “Together, they will help us push forward the intellectual and cultural work needed to make higher education a place where inquiry is truly free."

The fellows’ research while at the Segal Center will span topics of facilitating constructive disagreement via AI tools and affect regulation, how faculty understand intellectual freedom, how politics intersects with academic operations, applications of institutional neutrality policies to academic societies, and ameliorating distrust in higher ed and scientific institutions among conservatives. More information about the fellows can be found below and on HxA’s website.

About the Fellows

Jill Cermele is Professor of Psychology at Drew University and from 2022-2025 served as the Associate Dean of Faculty.  She researches self-defense as primary prevention against sexual assault and the importance of evidence rather than ideology in solutions to gender-based violence. Her research at the Segal Center as a Faculty Fellow will focus on the importance and development of affect regulation and affect tolerance in students and faculty in order to facilitate constructive disagreement and open inquiry. 

Simon Cullen is a visiting Research Professor of Artificial Intelligence & Civil Discourse at The University of North Carolina's School of Civic Life and Leadership. Previously he was a faculty member, Dean's Innovation Scholar, and Artificial Intelligence and Education Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University. Simon's research focuses on how to improve reasoning and communication across moral and political divides. He is the co-developer of Sway, a chat platform that uses AI to facilitate constructive dialogue between students with differing viewpoints. His research at the Segal Center will focus on examining how tools like Sway might advance constructive dialogue and disagreement. 

Michael Strambler is Associate Professor at the Yale School of Medicine and Director of Child Wellbeing and Education Research at The Consultation Center within the Division of Prevention and Community Research in the Department of Psychiatry. His research focuses on psychosocial well-being, particularly social and emotional learning (SEL), early childhood care and learning, and the sociopolitics of health and education. During his time at the Segal Center, he will investigate the extent to which professional scholarly associations in the social sciences have taken public stances on contested social and political issues, and explore whether something like institutional neutrality is a better policy for professional scholarly associations to adopt. 

Jeffrey Martin is Associate Professor of Anthropology and East Asian Languages & Cultures at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His research takes an anthropological approach to comparative policing studies, focusing on the ethical challenges of modern political life. He is the author of Sentiment, Reason, and Law: Policing in the Republic of China on Taiwan (Cornell, 2019), and has published widely on the way state power shapes civic life. During his time at the Segal Center, he will examine how academic disciplines manage the tension between scholarly autonomy and broader political commitments. Focusing on anthropology as a case study, the project explores how shared moral aspirations—such as the pursuit of justice—interact with the disciplinary apparatus that authorizes judgments of intellectual merit.

Kyle Siler is a visiting researcher at Cornell University where he applies a variety of computational and quantitative methodologies to study scientific integrity, misinformation, diffusion of innovations, and inequalities within scientific institutions. As a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Segal Center, he will investigate the sources of and possible ways to ameliorate the distrust conservatives have in academic and scientific institutions. 

Eric Torres is a PhD candidate in education at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, where he researches issues in educational and developmental psychology. His research at the Segal Center as a Postdoctoral Fellow will focus on understanding how faculty in the social sciences understand intellectual freedom.