Ifeoma Ajunwa
Ifeoma Yvonne Ajunwa (born 26 October 1980) is an award-winning Nigerian-American legal scholar, writer and tenured professor of law at the University of North Carolina School Of Law in the United States. She is also the Founding Director of the AI Decision-Making Research (AI-DR) Program at UNC Law. From 2021-2022, she is a Fulbright Scholar to Nigeria where she is studying the role of law for tech start-ups. Starting in January 2022, she was named a Visiting Fellow to Yale Law School's Information Society Project (ISP). She was previously an assistant  professor of labor and employment law at Cornell University from 2017-2020, earning tenure there in 2020. She has been a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard Law School since 2017. Education. Ajunwa received her BA at University of California, Davis in 2003, her JD at University of San Francisco School of Law in 2007, and her MPhil and PhD in Sociology at Columbia University in 2012 and 2017, respectively. Ajunwa was a McNair Scholar as an undergraduate student, received an AAUW Selected Professions Fellowship in law school, and was a Paul F. Lazersfeld Fellow as a  PhD student. Ajunwa's PhD thesis was advised by Josh Whitford. Career. Ajunwa is a prolific writer, legal scholar, AI ethics researcher, and tenured professor of law at the University of North Carolina School Of Law where she serves as the Founding Director of the AI Decision-Making Research (AI-DR) Program. Prior to that, Ajunwa was a professor at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations and an associate faculty member at Cornell Law School. She is a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, where previously she was a Fellow  from 2016-2017 and a Teaching Fellow at Harvard Law School. She also served as a Microsoft Research NYC Research Intern in 2015. Ajunwa's research interests are at the intersection of law and technology with a particular focus on  the ethical governance of workplace technologies, race and tech, corporate governance, and health equity and privacy. Her research focus is also on diversity and inclusion in the labor market and the workplace. She will publish a book - "The Quantified Worker" - with Cambridge University Press. Ajunwa was awarded tenure by Cornell University on May 22, 2020. On February 5, 2020, Ajunwa  testified at a U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor hearing on "The Future of Work: Protecting Workers' Civil Rights in the Digital Age". She discussed artificial intelligence-enabled racial bias in hiring practices and advocated for legislation protecting personal and genetic data privacy in the workplace. On May 6, 2018, Ajunwa was a TEDx Speaker at Cornell University where she presented a talk on the Controversies of Ethics and Technology in the Modern Workplace. At Cornell, Ajunwa has served as a board member on several advisory boards, including for the Institute for Africa Development and the Cornell  Prison Education Program (CPEP). Recently, Ajunwa was awarded a Fulbright to study legal issues related to tech start-ups in Nigeria. Awards and honors. Ajunwa's awards and honors include: Selected works. Ajunwa's scholarly writing includes: For Law review: For Peer Review and Other Publications: Ajunwa's public media writing includes: