Michael Wong
Masters candidate
Michael is a Master’s student at the Center for Constructive Communication, where he hopes to build and assess responsible systems that can promote discourse and conversations that strengthen democracy, particularly with respect to science communication and critical thinking. He also has a very keen interest in societal, environmental, and economic sustainability. Previously, he was a news applications developer at Canada’s non-profit Investigative Journalism Foundation, where he worked with investigative journalists to promote accountability and transparency in Canada’s democracy.
Prior to that, Michael was a Clarendon Scholar at the University of Oxford’s Oxford Internet Institute, where his Social Data Science Masters focused on using machine learning and statistics to illuminate how working from home might affect residential energy consumption while ensuring ethical scrutiny and privacy protections. He received his BSc with honors from the University of Toronto Scarborough in the dual disciplines of Astrophysics and Public Policy while doing research for UofT’s Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics and Centre for Global Change Science.
Otherwise, Michael can probably be seen with headphones on around the lab, listening to Epica, Hozier, Rammstein or F+tM (or others). Beyond that, he loves watching Critical Role or playing single-player story-driven video games, occasionally writing sci-fi/fantasy short stories, learning to draw, and trying to learn/relearn seven languages .
