Cassandra Overney is a PhD candidate, researcher, and designer at the MIT Media Lab's Center for Constructive Communication, where she builds AI-powered systems that strengthen the feedback loops between civic institutions and the communities they serve.
Her research targets a persistent gap in civic governance: civic leaders like urban planners and school administrators must synthesize thousands of community voices into transparent, defensible insights, but current methods rely on either time-intensive manual review or black-box AI summarization that communities cannot verify or trust. Through a multi-year co-design partnership with the NYC Department of City Planning and school districts in North Carolina, she develops platforms that create mutual accountability. Civic leaders gain tools for rigorous sensemaking, while community members gain visibility into how their input shapes outcomes.
Her work lives beyond the lab. Voice to Vision visualized how 3,000+ community inputs informed a neighborhood plan in Jamaica, Queens; a companion platform for Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools synthesized 13,000+ comments into 124 human-reviewed narratives during a redistricting process. She also led a community engagement process with Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, engaging 400+ participants and informing 8 magnet programs. As a member of the 2026 MITdesignX cohort and MIT Sandbox, she is exploring how to translate this research into a sustainable civic tech venture.
Cassandra holds a BS from Olin College of Engineering and is an NSF Graduate Research Fellow.
