Sera Linardi is the Founding Director of the Center for Analytical Approaches for Social Innovation (CAASI), an incubator of community-engaged social justice projects that combines both human-centered and quantitative approaches. Since 2020 CAASI has engaged more than 240 student and community members to co-design and launch two platforms, the Allegheny County Policing Project and 412Connect, a Black-owned Business scavenger hunt for university students. She is an Associate Professor of Economics at GSPIA and in the Intelligent Systems Program (ISP) at the University of Pittsburgh.
She earned her Ph.D. in Social Science from the California Institute of Technology and was formerly a computer scientist at Adobe Inc. Her experimental work on prosocial behavior has been published in journals such as Management Science, Journal of Politics, and Journal of Public Economics, winning several best paper and engaged scholarship awards. She is the winner of the 2022 XPRIZE in Racial Equity Alliance and Pitt's 2023 Chancellor's Distinguished Service Award.