Current PhD Students

Irene Feng

AI Ethics, Human-Machine Teaming, Cognitive Bias

Irene Feng is a fifth year doctoral student in George Mason University’s Human Factors and Applied Cognition program under Dr. Gerald Matthews. Prior to her PhD studies, Irene has done research in windblown dust under the Center for Spatial Information Science and Systems at George Mason University. She graduated in 2017 with a B.S. in Psychology and Philosophy at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Irene seeks to bring her multidisciplinary perspectives into her own research in the Human Factors and Applied Cognition program.

Selected Publications

Feng, I. Y., & Matthews, G. (2026). Design and Validation of a Novel Decision-Making Task for Unethical AI. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, 0(0).

Feng, I. Y., Gill, T. E., Van Pelt, R. S., Webb, N. P., & Tong, D. Q. (2025). Economic costs of wind erosion in the United States. Nature Sustainability, 1-8.

Matthews, G., Cumings, R., De Los Santos, E. P., Feng, I. Y., & Mouloua, S. A. (2024). A new era for stress research: supporting user performance and experience in the digital age. Ergonomics, 1–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/00140139.2024.2425953

Tong, D., Feng, I., Gill, T. E., Schepanski, K., & Wang, J. (2023) How Many People Were Killed by Windblown Dust Events in the United States? Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. 2023. https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-22-0186.1

Vita, R., Zheng, J. [et al., including Feng, I.] (2021). Standardization of assay representation in the Ontology for Biomedical Investigations. Database : the journal of biological databases and curation. 2021. 10.1093/database/baab040.

Courses Taught

PSYC 100: Introduction to Psychology

PSYC 309 (lab): Sensation, Perception, and Information Processing

Recent Presentations

Feng, I. (2019, August 27-29). How Many People Were Killed by Windblown Dust Events in the United States? A Myth of Two Tales [Conference presentation]. 2019 CoRP Symposium, College Park, MD, United States.

Feng, I. (2021, October 25-27). Windblown Dust: An Underappreciated Hazard [Conference presentation]. 2021 Southern New Mexico & Western U.S. Dust Symposium, La Cruces, NM, United States.

Feng, I. (2022, December 12-16). The Economic Cost of Wind Erosion in the United States. [Poster presentation]. AGU Fall Meeting 2022, Chicago, IL, United States.