Sarah Ita Levitan

Sarah Ita Levitan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Hunter College, CUNY, and a member of the doctoral faculty in both Computer Science and Linguistics PhD programs at the CUNY Graduate Center. She previously served as a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at Columbia University, where she completed her PhD in Computer Science in 2019 under Dr. Julia Hirschberg.

Research Focus:

• Spoken Language Processing
• Natural Language Processing
• Paralinguistic Analysis
• Trustworthiness and Deception Detection
• Acoustic-Procedic and Lexical Feature Extraction
• Online Radicalization and Misinformation

Recent Publications demonstrate expertise in analyzing speech and text for trust cues, deception detection, and mental health prediction. Her awards include grants from NSF, Google, and Columbia University fellowships. She leads the Hunter Speech Lab, mentoring PhD, MS, and undergraduate students in computational linguistics research.

Scientific Awards and Grants:

• NSF EAGER Grant (2023)
• Google Cyber NYC Grant (2023)
• NSF AI Institute Grant (2023)
• Air Force Office of Scientific Research Grant (2020)
• Brown Institute Seed Grant (2020)
• Knight News Innovation Fellowship (2018)

Teaching: Courses include Natural Language Processing (undergraduate/graduate), Computational Linguistics, Computer Theory, and advanced topics in spoken language processing at both Hunter College and Columbia University.