IRANWAR.AI

Jacob E. Thomas, MA, PhD studies how information environments shape mental health, behavior, and access to opportunity. His academic research interrogates the mechanisms by which corporations that profit from harmful products (e.g., tobacco, alcohol, and sugar-sweetened beverages) use media strategically to influence vulnerable populations, particularly youth, low-income communities, and historically marginalized groups. For more than a decade, he has worked among the largest and most consequential hospitals in the country (i.e., Parkland Psychiatry in Dallas, Bellevue Emergency Department in Lower Manhattan, NewYork-Presbyterian Behavioral Medicine Division in Washington Heights) and in university laboratories at NYU, Columbia University, and across the University of Texas System, contributing to NIH-, CDC-, and DoD-funded research grants awarded to various principal investigators totaling well over $50 million. He holds a PhD in Health Behavior from the University of Texas at Austin and an MA in Clinical Psychology from Columbia University. His research has been recognized by numerous awards and fellowships including The Nathaniel Wharton Fund, the UT-Austin College of Education, the Society for Prevention Research, the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco, and Teachers College.

In the technology industry, he serves as a Data Scientist and AI Strategist at one of the world's leading privately held recruitment marketing companies, where he directs a research lab studying the structural informational forces that degrade labor market conditions and, by extension, access to healthcare under the U.S. employer-mediated model. His work in this space has been recognized by the U.S. Army Recruiting Command and as a multi-time finalist for the Digital Job Advertising Excellence Award.

Beyond academia and industry, Dr. Thomas develops open-source research tools and intelligence platforms that aim to make the noise of the Information Flood (i.e., the media crisis fueled by synthetic data and inhumane algorithms) less overwhelming while actively critiquing the environment itself. His publicly available projects span conflict intelligence, AI-mediated historical dialogue, and the democratization of data science, each built on the conviction that the populations most affected by information asymmetry deserve access to the same quality of analysis as those who manage it.

The best part of his life is the hours spent at the park during open-sky Texas sunrises with his daughter, during watercolor Hill Country sunsets with his wife and dog, and in solitude reflecting on the spiritual dimensions of life.

Prakhar Sharma, PhD is a political scientist based in New York City. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University (2025) and brings 18+ years of experience producing field-based political risk analysis and applied research for U.S. government, NATO, and allied partners across 28 countries.

Dr. Sharma built his career in conflict research starting at the International Centre for Political Violence & Terrorism Research (ICPVTR) in Singapore, before moving to Kabul where he led research at a local conflict analysis center, directing 15 initiatives on insurgent networks, Taliban governance, and political violence, with analysis cited in U.S. and UN strategic assessments. He subsequently directed DoD-funded research on terrorism support and government legitimacy across 14 Afghan provinces, delivering threat assessments and briefings directly to U.S. military commands in Afghanistan, and conducted field research for UNICEF and the World Bank across Afghanistan's most insecure provinces.

He then managed DoD- and NSF-funded RCTs at Yale University's Political Violence FieldLab on insurgent influence and aid effectiveness, and served as a Stimson Center Visiting Fellow where he briefed the White House Deputy National Security Advisor, Congressional staff, and the State Department on Afghanistan insurgency dynamics. Most recently he served as Senior Specialist for Evaluation and Research at the International Republican Institute (IRI), directing CVE and conflict prevention research across 26 fragile states.

Across his career he has led 30+ research initiatives in conflict and transitional settings.

Eugene Osei Mensah, BSN, RN is a registered nurse and emerging researcher whose work bridges clinical practice, health systems, and the application of data science to humanitarian challenges. His clinical background with the Ghana Health Service has grounded him in the realities of health system delivery, while his research interests in nursing informatics and machine learning orient him toward the structural and computational dimensions of healthcare that most clinicians never encounter.

He contributes to the IranWar.ai project as a research collaborator, performing data quality assurance, reference verification, and the analysis of conflict-related information through a clinical nursing and public health lens. He focuses on bringing clinical reasoning to bear on the problem of how civilian populations are affected by armed conflict directly and indirectly.

Eugene is building an interdisciplinary research portfolio at the intersection of nursing science, informatics, and applied health data science, with the goal of designing intelligent and equitable health systems, particularly in complicated humanitarian settings where traditional infrastructure has failed.

Nigel Masara, BSc, MSc is a civil engineer and business-analytics researcher affiliated with the University of Zimbabwe. He holds a BSc in Civil Engineering, grounded by five years of applied work in infrastructure research and implementation, and an MSc in Business Analytics with specialized training in data science, natural language processing, artificial intelligence, and large language models. This dual foundation (i.e., structural systems in the physical world and computational methods for analyzing those systems) positions him to investigate the intersection of the built environment and open-source intelligence.

Within the IranWar.ai Working Group, Nigel examines the secondary morbidity and mortality that follow damage to civil infrastructure (e.g., power plants, water treatment facilities, and other essential systems whose disruption produces casualties long after the initial strike). His orientation toward the project is unambiguous: the welfare of every life caught inside the conflict is paramount, and real-time data on the condition of infrastructure is indispensable to the decisions that protect those lives.

This work is an extension of his broader research commitments: to place rigorous data analysis in direct service of people whose lives are at stake, and to apply the methods of contemporary data science for the greater good.