College of Science and Engineering
Jiaqi Wen is Named as the 2026-2027 CBI Tomash Fellow
MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (03/02/2026) — We are thrilled to announce that Simon Fraser University (SFU) ABD in Communication Jiaqi Wen is the incoming Charles Babbage Institute (CBI) Erwin and Adelle Tomash Fellow. Prior to entering her doctoral program at SFU, Wen earned a BA in Editing and Publishing from Sichuan University, Chengdu, China, and a MA in Media Studies from Humboldt-Universität, zu Berlin. At Humboldt, she focused her research on history of computing, and completed a Master’s thesis entitled, “Monte Carlo Simulation and the War Machine: Historical Epistemology of Pseudorandomness in Early Computer Simulation.” At SFU, Wen has continued her research on the history of computing in the School of Communication and has had the opportunity to work as a Research Assistant and Project Coordinator at the renowned Digital Democracies Institute. Wen’s dissertation advisor is standout historian of computing and mathematics SFU Professor of Communication Stephanie Dick.Wen has designed, developed, and is executing upon a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary dissertation that brings together important histories of the environment, materiality, embodiment, labor, and computing. This past year, Wen co-authored a thoughtful and important policy paper entitled “A Made-in-Canada Approach to AI” in Policy Options for nonprofit International Institute of Restorative Practices (IIRP) Canada.Wen’s dissertation focuses on the history and politics of thermal infrastructures for computation in the U.S. context. Her project, entitled, “Thermal Engineering and the Comfort Zone of Computation,” explores the parallel histories of computer and human body engineering grounded in thermal principles. It draws on case studies of air engineering in laboratory cleanrooms and their cultural representations, electronics manufacturing plants, supercomputer architectures, and experiments on human physiology inside thermal chambers from the 1950s until the late 1970s. She argues that the containment phenomena in both computing and body engineering have co-shaped the characteristics of postwar computing, informed the contemporary technologies of social control, and marginalized infrastructural knowledge and certain human groups. She highlights how the “logical ideation of computing does not conform to the indeterminate, leaky, and boundary-fluid realities in computing thermality,” which presents a critical moment for her “to think about the historical repercussions and possible transformations of computing epistemologies—as our contemporary living conditions.”The Tomash Fellowship is possible through the past generous support of CBI’s founders nearly a half century ago, Erwin and Adelle Tomash. A Tomash Fellowship has been awarded each year since the start of the CBI Tomash Fellowship in 1980.Jeffrey R. Yost
