Alondra Nelson

Harold F. Linder Professor

Alondra Nelson is the Harold F. Linder Professor of Social Science and director of the Science, Technology, and Social Values Lab at the Institute for Advanced Study, where she has served on the faculty since 2019. The ST&SV Lab explores emerging scientific and technological phenomena and their intersections with the frustration and fulfillment of civil, political, and social rights, including the political economy of AI and democratic science policy.

She was previously a professor of sociology at Columbia University, where she established the Division of Social Science and served as its first Dean. Nelson 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.

Nelson's research offers a critical and innovative approach to the social sciences, in sustained dialogue with other disciplines. Her 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. Across this work she argues that science and technology are constituted through institutional choices rather than acting on society from the outside, and are therefore explicable by social science and answerable to public authority. She connects these dimensions in books including The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome (2016) and Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination (2011). Her collaborative works span Auditing AI (2026, as a member The Marquand House Collective), Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History (2012, with Keith Wailoo and Catherine Lee), and Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life (2001, with Thuy Linh Tu). Recent essays include "Field Theory: AI as Social Science Question, Object, and Tool," "Platform Obscurantism," "A Civic Grammar for AI Rights," and "An ELSI for AI: Learning from Genetics to Govern Algorithms." Her articles appear in Science, Daedalus, PLOS Computational Biology, PLOS Medicine, Social Studies of Science, Social Media + Society, the Proceedings of the International Conference on Machine Learning, and the American Journal of Public Health.

The Future of Science Is Civic, co-edited with Elizabeth Good Christopherson and Dietram A. Scheufele, is forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press. Nelson is at work on a book of essays about science and technology policy in the Obama–Biden and Biden–Harris administrations; the reconsideration of prevailing ideas of society prompted by conditions exposed, exacerbated, or created by the emergence of the novel coronavirus; and platform society and AI governance. In 2027, she will deliver the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, to be published as a book. Nelson has given the British Journal of Sociology Lecture at the London School of Economics, the S.T. Lee Lecture at the Centre for Science and Policy, University of Cambridge, and the Ethics in AI Annual Lecture at the University of Oxford.

Between 2021 to 2023, Nelson held the position of deputy assistant to President Joe Biden and 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 role, which explicitly integrated social science expertise into federal science and technology strategy and policy. She was the architect of the White House "Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights," one of the first frameworks issued by a national government to set out rights-based principles for the design and use of automated systems. Its principles have since informed state legislation, international governance instruments, and institutional AI policies. Nature named Nelson to its global list of "10 People Who Shaped Science."

In 2023, she was on the inaugural TIME100 list of the most influential people in AI. She was 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 in 2024. Since 2024, she has served as a senior adviser to the International AI Safety Report.

As a researcher and adviser, Nelson provides guidance on domestic and international policy to local, state, and federal governments; legislators; multilateral organizations; and the philanthropic sector. She has spoken about technology policy, democratic governance, and the role of research in policy formation at the UK AI Safety Summit, the AI Action Summit in France, and the AI Impact Summit in India, and participated in the U.S. Senate AI Insight Forum. From 2024 to 2025, she served as a presidentially appointed member of the National Science Board, which sets policy for the National Science Foundation and advises both Congress and the President.

Nelson has held visiting fellowships and appointments 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. In 2025, she was awarded the inaugural Accelerator Fellowship at the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and by leading foundations.

Her essays, reviews, and commentary have appeared in Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, TIME, Die Zeit, Le Nouvel Observateur, Wired, and La Recherche. Her research and policy analysis have 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. She has been recognized with the MIT Morison Prize, the Federation of American Scientists Public Service Award, the NAACP–Archewell Foundation Digital Civil Rights Award, the Miles Conrad 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 elected to the American Academy of Arts and 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, the National Academy of Medicine, and the Sociological Research Association.

Raised in Southern California, Nelson earned her BA in anthropology magna cum laude 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.