People

As program director of Radius and as a chaplain in MIT's Office of Religious, Spiritual, and Ethical Life (ORSEL), Nicholas welcomes conversations with students, staff, faculty, and others in the MIT community on ethical issues in their fields as well as on matters of values-based personal discernment and discovery. 

Prior to arriving at MIT in 2023, Nicholas innovated spiritual care programs in the field of population health at two healthcare institutions in Philadelphia. There he also co-founded and co-facilitated a community-based climate organizing initiative. Nicholas is a peer leader in the Jewish Heritage Museum’s Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics, which creates dialogues among engineers, businesspeople, attorneys, journalists, religious professionals, and physicians on pressing ethical issues of the day. He studied film and literature at Yale University and the University of Paris before turning to doctoral work in spirituality and counseling psychology at Fordham University, where his dissertation explored personality typology in the context of contemporary neuroscience. 

Carissma McGee is pursuing a dual SM-PhD at MIT in Aeronautics & Astronautics and Technology Public Policy, conducting research in the STARLab under Dr. Kerri Cahoy. Carissma holds a B.S. in Physics & Astronomy from Howard University, where her time as a congressional intern in Washington, D.C., ignited her passion for using space technology to drive societal impact. After spending this past summer working at an AI startup in Morocco, she has gained a deeper appreciation for the transformative role of technology across cultures and its potential to effect global change.

Sabbi Lall is in the second year of the MDiv program at Harvard Divinity School, where she is training as a Chaplain and studying Hindu and Buddhist traditions. She works as an intern at Radius, focusing on program development and wellness initiatives. She has a DPhil from the Department of Zoology at Oxford and was Editor-in-Chief of Cell Reports before turning to searching for spiritual understandings of the scientific endeavor and looking for ways to support scientific trainees holistically.