Alondra Nelson

Alondra Nelson is a sociologist whose agenda-setting work examines how scientific knowledge and emerging technologies both mirror and remake hierarchies of social difference. Her research ranges across the social studies of science, medicine, genomics, digital platforms, and artificial intelligence, tracing how meaning and authority come to be embedded in scientific, technical, and institutional systems—and how the publics they touch contest and rework that design. She is the author, co-author, or editor of several books, including Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination; The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome; Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History; Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life; and, most recently, Auditing AI, an examination of accountability and oversight in automated decision-making. At the Institute for Advanced Study, she founded and leads the Science, Technology, and Social Values Lab. Through a sustained dialogue between the social sciences, the humanities, and computational and biological fields, she has decisively reshaped how scholars across fields think about democratic practice in a technological age, opening new questions well beyond her own discipline.