Aya Betensky has had a varied set of careers as a classics professor, editor and marketing manager for scholarly publishers, and web designer for academics and non-profits at Cornell University, New Jersey, and Pittsburgh.
Betensky’s husband, Robert Kraut, started his career as a social psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania and then at Cornell. After 12 years in the industry at Bell Labs and its offshoots, the Betensky-Kraut family moved to Pittsburgh, where Kraut joined the new Human-Computer Institute at Carnegie Mellon University to teach, do research and advise doctoral students. His research has frequently focused on understanding and improving human well-being, starting from his thesis work investigating what leads people to contribute to charity to more recent research on the impact of online communication on individual and group well-being.
Kraut and Betensky have come to love living in Pittsburgh and consider themselves and their family fortunate that they’ve been able to live good lives and work in meaningful fields. Keeping in mind their Jewish tradition of tikkun olam, repairing the world, they have volunteered for and contributed to causes they believe will help humanity. These causes include cooking at homeless shelters, building with Habitat for Humanity, tutoring Syrian refugees, conducting research on online support groups, and contributing to efforts to help the environment, reduce gun violence and more. The couple decided to give back to Pittsburgh in particular by setting up the Betensky-Kraut Fund for Children, Youth & Families at The Pittsburgh Foundation in 2017.
Through the Betensky-Kraut Fund for Children, Youth & Families, they have ensured that their commitment to building strong, collaborative communities will continue forever.
To learn more about Betensky’s and Kraut’s professional lives, visit their websites: