Peter Ondish

Work

I’m VP of Data and Research at avenera.ai, where I help organizations apply behavioral science and sound methodology to real decisions. Most of that work starts with the same problem: people have a question they think is about data, and it’s usually about behavior. My job is to tell the difference, then build something that holds up.

I also consult independently through DataFox Research. A lot of that is the unglamorous part nobody puts on a slide: whether the study was designed to answer the question it claims to, whether the numbers mean what people say they mean, and whether a decision is resting on evidence or on a confident voice in a meeting. Rigorous statistical and methodological evaluation usually gets skipped because it’s slow and it’s where the inconvenient answers live.

Research and teaching

I run academic research through a courtesy appointment as Senior Research Scientist at the University of Illinois, and I teach behavioral health at New York Medical College. Two research threads have most of my attention right now.

The first is building digital tools to reduce misinformation, with the Misinformation Research Lab. The interesting question there isn’t whether people believe false things. It’s why, and what you can build that respects them enough to do something about it.

The second is community-supported technology that gives users ownership of their own data. The premise is simple and unfashionable: the people using a technology should own what it knows about them. Most of the internet runs on the opposite assumption, so there’s plenty to work on.

I’m also a library team member at the Prosocial Design Network, which collects evidence on how to design online spaces that bring out better behavior instead of worse.

Other Projects

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of stand-up around Chicago. See, I already made you laugh. Comedy turns out to be a decent second discipline for someone who studies behavior for a living. You find out very quickly whether your read on a room was correct, and the feedback loop is brutal and immediate in a way research never is.

I’ve also trained jiu-jitsu since January 2023 under Daniel Vianna at Vianna Brothers. It’s the rare hobby that’s completely honest with you. The mat does not care about your credentials, and neither does anyone trying to choke you. The competition record is public, for better or worse.

Before all this

I grew up in Saegertown, Pennsylvania, and worked a grocery store, a butcher shop, and a metal factory before academia.