• Room 1001e, N21, University of Macau

  • (853) 8822 9213

  • (853) 8822 2456

  • jdexter@um.edu.mo

Ph.D., Systems Biology, Harvard University, USA

A.B., Chemistry, Princeton University, USA

  • February 2024 – Present: Assistant Professor, Institute of Collaborative Innovation, University of Macau
  • February 2024 – Present: Associate of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, USA
  • September 2020 – January 2024: Data Science Fellow, Harvard University, USA
  • August 2018 – August 2020: Neukom Fellow, Dartmouth College , USA
  • Harvard Data Science Fellowship ($227,810, 2020-2024)
  • Neukom Fellowship ($130,500, 2018-2020)
  • National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship ($130,000, 2013-2016)
  • John J. Keaney Thesis Prize, Princeton University (2013)
  • John J. Winkler Memorial Prize ($1,000, 2011)
  • United States Presidential Scholar (2009)
  • Research Science Institute Scholar (2008)

A computational biologist by training, I have broad interests across data science, and I am particularly enthusiastic about questions that span traditionally quantitative and qualitative disciplines. Topics of interest include: 1) digital humanities and computational literary criticism, especially for Latin, ancient Greek, and other premodern traditions; 2) cultural evolution and historical psychology; 3) health literacy and clear communication in medicine and public health; and 4) systems-level mathematical modeling for biomedicine. Many aspects of my research program involve natural language processing and analysis of large textual corpora. Across all projects, I aim to promote linguistic fairness through careful attention to lower-resource languages and systematic study of Anglophone bias.

  • CoronaVirusFacts Alliance Grant, Poynter Institute, “Characterizing the Comprehensibility of Trustworthy and Untrustworthy Information About COVID-19” (PI; $5,000, 2020)
  • Digital Extension Grant, American Council of Learned Societies, “Linking Literature, Bioinformatics, and Machine Learning through the Quantitative Criticism Lab” (co-PI; $150,000, 2019-2020)
  • Project Grant, Leslie Center for the Humanities, Dartmouth College, “Part I of the ‘Digital Humanities Beyond Modern English’ Conference” (PI; $20,000, 2019)
  • Workshop Grant, Neukom Institute for Computational Science, Dartmouth College, “Part I of the ‘Digital Humanities Beyond Modern English’ Conference” (PI; $15,000, 2019)
  • Member of Constructive Advanced Thinking working group on fairness and bias in language technologies
  • Member of program committee of natural language processing conferences (ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, EACL)
  • Ad hoc reviewer for numerous journals (e.g., JAMA Network Open, Journal of Medical Internet Research, Vaccine, iScience, Biophysical Journal)
  • Grant reviewer for Icelandic Research Fund
  • Member of selection committee for Research Science Institute
  • Co-organizer of two-part “Digital Humanities Beyond Modern English” conference
  • V. Mishra and J.P. Dexter, “Response of Unvaccinated US Adults to Official Information About the Pause in Use of the Johnson & Johnson-Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine,” Journal of Medical Internet Research (forthcoming)
  • M.J.S. MacEwen, D.-V. Rusnac, H. Ermias, T.M. Locke, H.E. Gizinski, J.P. Dexter, and Y. Sancak, “Mathematical modeling and biochemical analysis support partially ordered CaM-MLCK binding,” iScience 26 (2023) 106146. doi:10.1016/j.isci.2023.106146
  • J.P. Dexter and V. Mishra, “Understanding of and Trust in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Revised COVID-19 Isolation and Quarantine Guidance Among US Adults,” Journal of General Internal Medicine 38 (2023) 554-557. doi:10.1007/s11606-022-07904-8
  • A. Fedchin, P.J. Burns, P. Chaudhuri, and J.P. Dexter, “Senecan Trimeter and Humanist Tragedy,” American Journal of Philology 143 (2022) 475-503. doi:10.1353/ajp.2022.0019
  • P. Chaudhuri and J.P. Dexter, “More Latian Anagrams (Aen. 8.314-36),” Classical Philology 117 (2022) 200-209. doi:10.1086/717567
  • J.P. Dexter and P. Chaudhuri, “Dardanio Anchisae: Hiatus, Homer, and Intermetricality in the Aeneid,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 111 (2021) 245-256
  • P.J. Burns, J.A. Brofos, K. Li, P. Chaudhuri, and J.P. Dexter, “Profiling of Intertextuality in Latin Literature Using Word Embeddings,” Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (2021) 4900-4907. doi:10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.389
  • V. Mishra and J.P. Dexter, “Comparison of Readability of Official Public Health Information About COVID-19 on Websites of International Agencies and the Governments of 15 Countries,” JAMA Network Open 3 (2020) e2018033. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.18033
  • J.P. Dexter, S. Prabakaran, and J. Gunawardena, “A Complex Hierarchy of Avoidance Behaviors in a Single-Cell Eukaryote,” Current Biology 29 (2019) 4323-4329. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2019.10.059
  • P. Chaudhuri, T. Dasgupta, J.P. Dexter, and K. Iyer, “A small set of stylometric features differentiates Latin prose and verse,” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 34 (2019) 716-729. doi:10.1093/llc/fqy070
  • T.J. Bolt., J.H. Flynt, P. Chaudhuri, and J.P. Dexter, “A Stylometry Toolkit for Latin Literature,” Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP): System Demonstrations (2019) 205-210. doi:10.18653/v1/D19-3035
  • L. Neidorf, M.S. Krieger, M. Yakubek, P. Chaudhuri, and J.P. Dexter, “Large-scale quantitative profiling of the Old English verse tradition,” Nature Human Behaviour 3 (2019) 560-567. doi:10.1038/s41562-019-0570-1
  • J.P. Dexter, P.S. Ward, T. Dasgupta, A.M. Hosios, J. Gunawardena, and M.G. Vander Heiden, “Lack of evidence for substrate channeling or flux between wildtype and mutant isocitrate dehydrogenase to produce the oncometabolite 2-hydroxyglutarate,” Journal of Biological Chemistry 293 (2018) 20051-20061. doi:10.1074/jbc.RA118.004278
  • J.P. Dexter, T. Katz, N. Tripuraneni, T. Dasgupta, A. Kannan, J.A. Brofos, J.A. Bonilla Lopez, L.A. Schroeder, A. Casarez, M. Rabinovich, A. Haimson Lushkov, and P. Chaudhuri, “Quantitative criticism of literary relationships,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 114 (2017) E3195-E3204. doi:10.1073/pnas.1611910114
  • J.P. Dexter, T. Dasgupta, and J. Gunawardena, “Invariants reveal multiple forms of robustness in bifunctional enzyme systems,” Integrative Biology 7 (2015) 883-894. doi:10.1039/c5ib00009b
  • J.P. Dexter and J. Gunawardena, “Dimerization and bifunctionality confer robustness to the isocitrate dehydrogenase regulatory system in Escherichia coli,” Journal of Biological Chemistry 288 (2013) 5770-5778. doi:10.1074/jbc.M112.339226
  • J.P. Dexter, “The Reception of Phanocles at Georgics 4.507-27,” Mnemosyne 66 (2013) 303311. doi:10.1163/156852512X621448
  • J.P. Dexter and W. Parker, “Parallel combinatorial chemical synthesis using single-layer poly(dimethylsiloxane) microfluidic devices,” Biomicrofluidics 3 (2009) 034106. doi:10.1063/1.3230501