Alondra Nelson (born April 22,1968) is an American academic,policy advisor,non-profit administrator,and writer. She is the Harold F. Linder chair and professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study,an independent research center in Princeton,New Jersey. From 2021 to 2023,Nelson was deputy assistant to President Joe Biden and principal deputy director for science and society of the White HouseOffice of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP),where she performed the duties of the director from February to October 2022.[1][2] She was the first African American and first woman of color to lead OSTP.[3] Prior to her role in the Biden Administration,she served for four years as president and CEO of the Social Science Research Council,an independent,nonpartisan international nonprofit organization. Nelson was previously professor of sociology at Columbia University,where she served as the inaugural Dean of Social Science,[4] as well as director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. She began her academic career on the faculty of Yale University.
Nelson writes and lectures widely on the intersections of science,technology,medicine,and social inequality. She has authored or edited articles,essays,and four books including,most recently,The Social Life of DNA:Race,Reparations,and Reconciliation after the Genome.
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From the Fall 1999 to the Spring 2001,Nelson was the New York University Minority Dissertation Fellow in the Department of American Studies at Skidmore College.
From 2003 to 2009,Nelson was assistant professor and associate professor of African American studies and sociology at Yale University,[7][8] where she was the recipient of the Poorvu Award for Interdisciplinary Teaching Excellence and a Faculty Fellow in Trumbull College.[9] At Yale,Nelson was the first African American woman to join the Department of Sociology faculty since its founding 128 years prior.
Nelson was recruited to Columbia from Yale in 2009 as an associate professor of sociology and gender studies. She was the first African American to be tenured in the Department of Sociology at this institution. At Columbia,she directed the Institute for Research on Women and Gender (now the Institute for Gender and Sexuality),founded the Columbia University Women's,Gender,and Sexuality Council,[10] and served as the first Dean of Social Science[11] for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.[12] As dean,Nelson led the first strategic planning process for the social sciences at Columbia University,[13] successfully restructured the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy,and helped to establish several initiatives,including the Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equity program,[14] the Eric J. Holder Initiative for Civil and Political Rights,[15] the June Jordan Fellowship Program,[16] the Precision Medicine and Society Program,[17][18] and the SabancıCenter for Turkish Studies.[19] She left the Columbia University faculty in June 2019 to assume the Harold F. Linder chair and professorship at the Institute for Advanced Study,[20] "the Princeton,New Jersey,organization that once housed the likes of Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer."[21]
In February 2017,the Social Science Research Council board of directors announced its selection of Nelson as the 94-year old organization's fourteenth president and CEO,succeeding Ira Katznelson.[22] She was the first African American,first person of color,and second woman to lead the Social Science Research Council. Nelson's tenure as SSRC president ended in 2021 and was hailed as "transformative," particularly in the areas of intellectual innovation and institutional collaboration.[23] At the SSRC,she established programs in the areas of new media and emerging technology;democracy and politics;international collaboration;anticipatory social research,and the study of inequality,including:the Social Data Initiative,"an ambitious research project that aimed to give academics access to troves of Facebook data in order to examine the platform's impact on democracy,"[24] the Just Tech Fellowship,MediaWell,a misinformation and disinformation research platform,Democratic Anxieties in the Americas,the Transregional Collaboratory on the Indian Ocean,the Religion,Spirituality,and Democratic Renewal fellowship,the Arts Research with Communities of Color program,the Inequality Initiative,and the widely praised and influential COVID-19 and the Social Sciences platform.
Nelson was a member of the board for African-American Affairs at Monticello. She serves on the advisory board of the Obama Presidency Oral History Project.
From 2014 to 2017,Nelson was the academic curator for the YWCA of New York City and was also a member of its program committee.
Nelson was a juror for the inaugural Aspen Words Literary Prize in 2017. She served as a juror for the Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program from 2018 to 2021,[34] and since 2023.
Before joining the Biden Administration,Nelson was co-chair of the NAM Committee on Emerging Science,Technology,and Innovation,and a member of the National Academy of Engineering Committee on Responsible Computing Research. She has been a member of the World Economic Forum Network on AI,the Internet of Things,and the Future of Trust,and the Council on Big Data,Ethics,and Society. Nelson is past chair of the American Sociological Association's Science,Knowledge,and Technology section;from 2020 to 2021,she was president-elect of the international scholarly association,the Society for Social Studies of Science,relinquishing this leadership role when she assumed the role of OSTP deputy director for science and society.
On February 17,2022,President Joe Biden announced that Nelson,whom he'd previously appointed deputy director for science and society in the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP),[39] would lead OSTP until permanent leadership could be confirmed.[1] She was also appointed as deputy assistant to the president at this time. She was the first Black person and first woman of color to lead OSTP in the office's 46-year history. In this interim role,Nelson led "OSTP's six policy divisions in their work to advance critical administration priorities,including groundbreaking clean energy investments;a people's Bill of Rights for automated technologies;a national strategy for STEM equity;appointment of the nation's Chief Technology Officer;data-driven guidance for implementing the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law;a transformative,life-saving Community Connected Health initiative;and programs to ensure the U.S. remains a magnet for the world's top innovators and scientists."[40] She served as acting director until October 3,2022,when Arati Prabhakar was sworn in as the U.S. Senate-confirmed director of OSTP.
Her January 2021 appointment as OSTP deputy director for science and society was praised as an "inspired choice" of "a distinguished scholar and thought leader," whose "scholarship on genetics,social inequality and medical discrimination is deeply insightful and hugely influential across multiple fields,most notably because of its focus on excellence,equity and fairness in scientific and medical innovation."[41] Others anticipated Nelson would "open... many doors... to [create] a more inclusive government;" Protocol said she was "the embodiment" of candidate Biden's commitment "to bring a civil rights lens to all of his administration's policies,including tech policy."[42]Science magazine reported that Nelson's appointment reflected President Biden's concern with how the "benefits of science and technology remain unevenly distributed across racial,gender,economic,and geographic lines."[43]
As OSTP principal deputy director for science and society,Nelson oversaw the work of the scientific integrity task force,[44] an interagency body mandated in President Biden's "Memorandum on Restoring Trust in Government Through Scientific Integrity and Evidence-Based Policymaking" to review scientific integrity policies and practices in the federal government,including cases of improper political interference in scientific research,and the distortion of scientific and technological data and findings.[45] Her portfolio also include open science policy,[46] policy to strengthen and broaden participation in the STEM fields,[47] and new and emerging technology policy. She co-chaired the Equitable Data Working Group,[48] a body that was established by President Biden by Executive Order 13985,Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government,and co-authored its report. On October 8,2021,Nelson co-authored an op-ed with OSTP Director Eric Lander announcing a policy planning process for the creation of an "AI Bill of Rights." On October 4,2022,OSTP released the "Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights."[49]
As OSTP acting director for eight months,Nelson "push[ed] policymaking motivated by... the notion that emerging technologies should be built with the fundamental rights held by citizens in a democratic society as their blueprint," including digital assets,[50] climate and energy science and technology innovation,[51] artificial intelligence,privacy-enhancing technologies,and public health measures such as indoor air quality for COVID-19 mitigation.[52][21] Nelson advanced President Biden's Cancer Moonshot and administered the Cancer Cabinet.[53][54] She encouraged greater transparency and engagement with the public in science and technology policy,championing public access to federal research,community-engaged science,and frequent external-facing communication about OSTP's work. Nelson represented United States in science and technology policy on the world stage,including at the OECD,the World Academy of Sciences,[55] the Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator,[56] in meetings with the Republic of Korea,the European Commission,the Council of Europe,the Netherlands,Austria,Japan,the United Kingdom and others,[57] and as Head of Delegation at the G7 Science Ministerial in Frankfurt,Germany—this meeting's topics included protecting the freedom,integrity and security of science and research;contributions of research to combating climate change;research on COVID-19 and its impacts;and support the rebuilding of Ukraine's science and research ecosystem.[58]
Nelson's tenure at OSTP ended in February 2023 at the conclusion of her public service leave from the Institute for Advanced Study.[59][60]
In October 2023,she was nominated by the White House,and then appointed by United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres,to serve on the UN High-level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence.[61]
Writing
Nelson researches and writes about the intersections of science,technology,medicine,and inequality.[62] "At its core,her philosophy was that focusing solely on those communities' exclusion not just misread the past,but shriveled the future possibilities innovation holds for them," Politico noted.[21] Nelson has also written extensively about genetics,genomics,race,and racialization.[63]
1990s through 2009
Nelson is a pioneer in study of race and technology,a field of inquiry she helped to establish in the late 1990s.[64] In 2001,with co-authors,Nelson contributed a chapter to,and co-edited—with Thuy Linh N. Tu—Technicolor:Race,Technology and Everyday Life, one of the first scholarly works to examine the racial politics of contemporary technoculture.[65][66]
Nelson founded and led the Afrofuturism on-line community in 1998,and edited an eponymous special issue of the journal Social Text in 2002.[67] She is also among a small group of social theorists of Afrofuturism. Particularly,her 2002 essay "Future Texts" lends insight onto the inequitable access to technologies. Nelson explained Afrofuturism as a way of looking at the subject position of Black people that covers themes of alienation and aspirations for a better future. Additionally,Nelson notes that discussions around race,access,and technology often bolster uncritical claims about the "digital divide." The digital-divide framing,she argues,may overemphasize the role of access to technology in reducing inequality as opposed to other non-technical factors. Noting the racial stereotyping work of the "digital divide" concept,she writes,"Blackness gets constructed as always oppositional to technologically driven chronicles of progress."[68][non-primary source needed] She continued,"Forecasts of a race-free (to some) utopian future and pronouncements of the dystopian digital divide are the predominant discourses of blackness and technology in the public sphere. What matters is less a choice between these two narratives... and more what they have in common:namely the assumption that race is a liability in the twenty-first century... either negligible or evidence of negligence."[68][non-primary source needed]
In February 2005,Nelson was named one of "13 Notable Blacks In Technology" by Black Voices.[69]
Nelson's 2011 book,Body and Soul:The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination,[70] was praised by Publishers Weekly as deserving "commendation for its thoughtfulness and thoroughness,"[71] was noted as "a much-needed and major work that will set the standard for scholars" by the American Historical Review,[72] and was hailed by leading scholar Henry Louis Gates,Jr. as "a revelation" and "a tremendously important book."[70]Body and Soul inspired an October 2016 special issue of the American Journal of Public Health on the Black Panther Party's health legacy,which Nelson co-curated,[citation needed] and was recognized with several awards,including the Mirra Komarovsky Book Award.[73]
With co-authors,Nelson contributed chapters to,and co-edited—with Keith Wailoo and Catherine Lee—Genetics and the Unsettled Past:The Collision of DNA,Race,and History,published in 2012.[74]
In 2016,she published The Social Life of DNA:Race,Reparations,and Reconciliation After the Genome,[75] considered to be a "landmark book". [according to whom?]Kirkus Reviews described Nelson's book about the uses of genetic ancestry testing in Black communities,as a "meticulously detailed" work that "adds another chapter to the somber history of injustice toward African-Americans,but... one in which science is enriching lives by forging new identities and connections to ancestral homelands."[76]
Writer Isabel Wilkerson hailed the book as the work of "one of this generation's most gifted scholars."[77]The Social Life of DNA received honorable mention for the 2021 Diana Forsythe Book Award,[78] was a finalist for the 2017 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Nonfiction,and was named a Favorite Book of 2016 by The Wall Street Journal.[79]
Diana Forsythe Prize (Honorable Mention) from the Committee for the Anthropology of Science,Technology &Computing and the Society for the Anthropology of Work of the American Anthropological Association for The Social Life of DNA,2020 [78]
Morison Prize,recognizing outstanding individuals who combine humanistic values with effectiveness in practical affairs,particularly in science and technology,Massachusetts Institute of Technology,2020 [95]
Inaugural Friedrich Schiedel Prize for Social Sciences and Technology for "pioneering work and outstanding and field-building contributions at the intersection of social sciences and technology," Technical University of Munich,2023
Dorothy Irene Height Award/Trailblazer Award,New York University,2024 [112][113]
Alumni Changemaker Award,University of California at San Diego,2024 [114]
Personal life
She was born in Bethesda,Maryland,in 1968,the daughter of Robert Nelson,a career member of the U.S. Navy and retired master chief petty officer,and Delores Nelson,a cryptographer and systems analyst for the U.S. Army and Department of Defense.[115][116] The eldest of four siblings,she was raised in San Diego,California. Nelson has one sister,Andrea,and two brothers,Robert and Anthony. She attended the University of San Diego High School,a private coeducationalCatholic college preparatory day school.
Nelson is married to Garraud Etienne,a non-profit executive. She was previously married to Ben Williams,executive features editor at The Washington Post,and former digital editor at GQ and New York Magazine.
Har Gobind Khorana was an Indian-American biochemist. While on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, he shared the 1968 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Marshall W. Nirenberg and Robert W. Holley for research that showed the order of nucleotides in nucleic acids, which carry the genetic code of the cell and control the cell's synthesis of proteins. Khorana and Nirenberg were also awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University in the same year.
Eric Steven Lander is an American mathematician and geneticist who is a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a professor of systems biology at Harvard Medical School. Eric Lander is founding director emeritus of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
Jacqueline K. Barton, is an American chemist. She worked as a professor of chemistry at Hunter College (1980–82), and at Columbia University (1983–89) before joining the California Institute of Technology. In 1997 she became the Arthur and Marian Hanisch Memorial Professor of Chemistry and from 2009 to 2019, the Norman Davidson Leadership Chair of the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Caltech. She currently is the John G. Kirkwood and Arthur A. Noyes Professor of Chemistry, Emerita.
Cornelius Francis "Neal" Lane, is an American physicist and senior fellow in science and technology policy at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy and Malcolm Gillis University Professor Emeritus of Physics and Astronomy Emeritus at Rice University in Houston, Texas.
The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is a department of the United States government, part of the Executive Office of the President (EOP), established by United States Congress on May 11, 1976, with a broad mandate to advise the President on the effects of science and technology on domestic and international affairs.
The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) is a council, chartered in each administration with a broad mandate to advise the president of the United States on science and technology. The current PCAST was established by Executive Order 13226 on September 30, 2001, by George W. Bush, was re-chartered by Barack Obama's April 21, 2010, Executive Order 13539, by Donald Trump's October 22, 2019, Executive Order 13895, and by Joe Biden's February 1, 2021, Executive Order 14007.
Darleane Christian Hoffman is an American nuclear chemist who was among the researchers who confirmed the existence of seaborgium, element 106. She is a faculty senior scientist in the Nuclear Science Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor in the graduate school at UC Berkeley. In acknowledgment of her many achievements, Discover magazine recognized her in 2002 as one of the 50 most important women in science.
Philip E. Rubin is an American cognitive scientist, technologist, and science administrator known for raising the visibility of behavioral and cognitive science, neuroscience, and ethical issues related to science, technology, and medicine, at a national level. His research career is noted for his theoretical contributions and pioneering technological developments, starting in the 1970s, related to speech synthesis and speech production, including articulatory synthesis and sinewave synthesis, and their use in studying complex temporal events, particularly understanding the biological bases of speech and language.
Jennifer A. Richeson is an American social psychologist who studies racial identity and interracial interactions. She is currently the Philip R. Allen Professor of Psychology at Yale University where she heads the Social Perception and Communication Lab. Prior to her appointment to the Yale faculty, Richeson was Professor of Psychology and African-American studies at Northwestern University. In 2015, she was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences. Richeson was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022. Since 2021, she has been a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).
Thomas J. Sugrue is an American historian of the 20th-century United States currently serving as a professor at New York University. From 1991 to 2015, he was the David Boies Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and founding director of the Penn Social Science and Policy Forum. His areas of expertise include American urban history, American political history, housing and the history of race relations. He has published extensively on the history of liberalism and conservatism, on housing and real estate, on poverty and public policy, on civil rights, and on the history of affirmative action.
Mae Ngai is an American historian and Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History at Columbia University. She focuses on nationalism, citizenship, ethnicity, immigration, and race in 20th-century United States history.
Inez Fung is a professor of atmospheric science at the University of California, Berkeley, jointly appointed in the department of earth and planetary science and the department of environmental science, policy and management. She is also the co-director of the Berkeley Institute of the Environment.
Mary Rita Cooke Greenwood is a nationally recognized leader in higher education, nutrition, and health sciences. Additionally, her research has been extensively published, internationally recognized, and has earned awards.
Shana O. Kelley is a scientist and Neena B. Schwartz Professor of Chemistry and Biomedical Engineering at Northwestern University. She is affiliated with Northwestern's International Institute for Nanotechnology and was previously part of the University of Toronto's Faculty of Pharmacy and Faculty of Medicine. Kelley's research includes the development of new technologies for clinical diagnostics and drug delivery. In 2023, she was chosen as president of Chicago's new Chan Zuckerberg Biohub.
Rosina M. Bierbaum is currently the Roy F. Westin Chair in Natural Economics and Research Professor at the University of Maryland's School of Public Policy. She is also a professor and former dean at the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources and Environment (SNRE). She was hired in October 2001, by then-University of Michigan President, Lee Bollinger. She is also the current Chair of The Scientific and Technical Advisory Panel (STAP) that provides independent scientific and technical advice to the GEF on its policies, strategies, programs, and projects.
Arati Prabhakar is an American engineer and public official. Since October 3, 2022, she has served as the 12th director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Science Advisor to the President.
Ann Juanita Morning is an American sociologist and demographer whose research focuses on race. In particular, she has studied racial and ethnic classification on censuses worldwide, as well as beliefs about racial difference in the United States and Western Europe. Much of her work examines how contemporary science—particularly the field of genetics—influences how we conceptualize race.
Ruha Benjamin is a sociologist and a professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. The primary focus of her work is the relationship between innovation and equity, particularly focusing on the intersection of race, justice and technology. Benjamin is the author of numerous publications, including the books People's Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (2013), Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019) and Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (2022).
Claudia Benitez-Nelson is a Latinx American oceanographer whose research focuses on marine geochemistry and biogeochemistry. A Carolina Distinguished Professor, she serves as the Senior Associate Dean for College Initiatives and Interdisciplinary Programs at the University of South Carolina’s College of Arts and Sciences.
Afua Bruce is an American engineer, data executive, professor, and former U.S. government official who has held appointments at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and on President Joe Biden’s transition agency review team at the Department of Justice. In 2021, a statue was erected in Bruce's honor in Dallas, Texas by the American Association for Advancement of Science. Bruce is a public interest technologist.
↑ Estrada, Sheryl. "What Does it Mean to be Hi-Tech Anyway?", Black Issues Book Review, January 1, 2002.
↑ Archived August 19, 2007, at the Wayback Machine Reviews of Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life. Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies.
↑ Pfeiffer, John (2003) "Review of Alondra Nelson, guest ed." [Social Text 71: Afrofuturism] Utopian Studies 14:1, 240-43.[verification needed]
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