Alondra Nelson

Harold F. Linder Professor

Widely known for her research at the intersection of science, technology, and society, Alondra Nelson holds the Harold F. Linder Chair and leads the Science, Technology, and Social Values Lab at the Institute for Advanced Study, where she has served on the faculty since 2019.

She was previously a professor of sociology at Columbia University, where she established the Division of Social Science and served as its first Dean. She also served as the 14th president and CEO of the Social Science Research Council, an independent, international nonprofit organization, where she developed innovative programs that applied foundational research to pressing social challenges. She began her academic career on the faculty of Yale University, where she received the Poorvu Award for Interdisciplinary Teaching Excellence.

Her research offers a critical and innovative approach to the social sciences, in sustained dialogue with other disciplines. Nelson’s major scholarly contributions lie at the intersection of racial formation and social citizenship, on the one hand, and emerging scientific and technological phenomena, on the other. She connects these dimensions in award-winning and acclaimed books, including The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome (2016); Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History (2012, with Keith Wailoo and Catherine Lee); Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination (2011); and Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life (2001, with Thuy Linh Tu). She has also contributed articles to Science, PLOS Computational Biology, PLOS Medicine, Genetics in Medicine, the Proceedings of the International Conference on Machine Learning, and the American Journal of Public Health. She is a contributor to the International AI Safety Report.

Her book Auditing AI, co-authored with The Marquand House Collective, is forthcoming from MIT Press in early 2026. Nelson is also at work on a book about science and technology policy in the Obama–Biden and Biden–Harris administrations; a series of essays examining how the conditions exposed, exacerbated, or created by the emergence of the novel coronavirus prompt reconsideration of prevailing ideas of society; and research on platform society and AI governance.

From 2021 to 2023, Nelson served as deputy assistant to President Joe Biden and as acting director and principal deputy director for science and society in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). She was the first to hold the latter roles, which explicitly integrated social science expertise into federal science and technology strategy and policy. She led the development of the White House Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, a cornerstone of President Biden’s Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence. In recognition of her impactful tenure at OSTP, Nature named Nelson to its global list of “10 People Who Shaped Science.” 

In 2023, she was included in the inaugural TIME100 list of the most influential people in AI. She was also appointed by United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres—following her White House nomination—to the UN High-level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence, which issued the Governing AI for Humanity report.  

Professor Nelson is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. As a policy researcher and adviser, she provides guidance on domestic and international policy to local, state, and federal governments; legislators; multilateral and international organizations; and the philanthropic sector. She has spoken at the UK AI Safety Summit and the Paris AI Action Summit and participated in the U.S. Senate AI Insight Forum. From 2024 to 2025, she served on the National Science Board, which sets policy for the National Science Foundation and advises both Congress and the President.

Nelson has held visiting professorships and fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the BIOS Centre at the London School of Economics, the Bayreuth Academy, and the Bavarian American Academy. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and by leading private foundations, including the Ford, Andrew W. Mellon, Alfred P. Sloan, Doris Duke, Kavli, Heising-Simons, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur, and Surdna foundations.

Her essays, reviews, and commentary have appeared in leading media outlets, including Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, TIME, Die Zeit, Le Nouvel Observateur, Wired, and La Recherche. Her work has also been featured on CNN, National Public Radio, CBC, Bloomberg, and the BBC, among other venues.

Nelson has received honorary degrees from Amherst College, the City University of New York, Northeastern University, and Rutgers University. Her honors include the MIT Morison Prize, the Federation of American Scientists Public Service Award, the NAACP–Archewell Foundation Digital Civil Rights Award, the Morals and Machines Prize, and the Sage Publishing and Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Sage–CASBS) Award from Stanford University for “outstanding achievement in the behavioral and social sciences that advances our understanding of pressing social issues.” She also received the inaugural Friedrich Schiedel Prize for Social Sciences and Technology from the Technical University of Munich for “pioneering work and outstanding, field-building contributions at the intersection of social sciences and technology.”

She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Philosophical Society, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the National Academy of Medicine.

Raised in Southern California, Nelson earned her BA in anthropology from the University of California, San Diego, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and her PhD in American studies from New York University in 2003.