Alondra Nelson
Alondra Nelson (born 1968) is an American policymaker, writer, and academic. 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. She currently serves as acting director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and Deputy Assistant to the President. From 2017-2021, she was president of the Social Science Research Council, an international research nonprofit organization. She was previously professor of sociology at Columbia University in the City of New York, where she served  as the inaugural Dean of Social Science, as well as director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. She began her 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". Early life and education. Nelson earned a bachelor of science degree in anthropology, "magna cum laude", from the University of California, San Diego, in 1994. While there, she was elected  to Phi Beta Kappa. She earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from New York University in 2003. Career. From 2003 to 2009, she was assistant professor and associate professor of African American Studies and Sociology at Yale University, where she was the recipient of the Poorvu Award for Interdisciplinary Teaching Excellence and a Faculty Fellow in Trumbull College. 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, founded the Columbia University Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Council, and served as Dean of Social Science for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. As dean, Nelson led the first strategic planning process for the social sciences at Columbia University, 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, the Eric J. Holder Initiative for Civil and  Political Rights, the June Jordan Fellowship Program, and the Sabancı Center for Turkish Studies. She left the Columbia University faculty in June 2019 to assume the Harold F. Linder chair and professorship at the Institute for Advanced Study. 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. 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. At the SSRC, she established programs in the areas of new media and emerging technology; democracy and politics; international collaboration; anticipatory social science, and equity, justice, and inequality, including the Social Data Initiative, the Just Tech Fellowship, MediaWell, 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. Prior to her White House appointment, Nelson served  on the boards of directors of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Center for Research Libraries, the Data and Society Research Institute, the Rockefeller Archive Center, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Teagle Foundation, and the United States International University Africa in Nairobi, Kenya. She currently serves on the board of directors of the Brotherhood/Sister Sol. She is a member of the board for African-American Affairs at Monticello as well as the advisory board of the Obama Presidency Oral History Project. From 2014 to 2017, Nelson was 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 was a juror for the Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program from 2018-2021. Nelson has been elected to fellowships and memberships in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Medicine (NAM), the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the Sociological Research Association. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. 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; she was president-elect of the international Society for Social Studies of Science from 2020-2021, relinquishing this leadership role when she assumed the  role of OSTP Deputy Director for Science and Society. Nelson has been a visiting scholar or fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the BIOS Centre for the Study of Bioscience, Biomedicine, Biotechnology and Society at the London School of Economics, the Bavarian American Academy, and the International Center for Advanced Studies at New York University. Political appointment. On February 17, 2022, President Joe Biden announced that Nelson, who he'd previously appointed a deputy director in the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), would lead OSTP until permanent leadership could be confirmed. As deputy  director of science and society, her appointment 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." 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." "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.” As OSTP director of science and society, Nelson oversaw the work of the scientific integrity task force, 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. Her portfolio also includes open science policy, policy  to strengthen and broaden participation in the STEM fields, and new and emerging technology policy. She co-chairs the Equitable Data Working Group, a body that was established by President Biden by Executive Order 13985, Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government. 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." Writing. Nelson researches and writes about the intersections of science, technology, medicine, and inequality. She is a pioneer in study of race and technology , a field of inquiry she helped to establish in the late 1990s. Named one of "13 Notable Blacks In Technology" by "Black Voices", she founded and led the Afrofuturism on-line community in 1998, and edited an eponymous special issue of the journal "Social Text" in 2002. 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." 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." Nelson is co-editor, with Thuy Linh N. Tu, of "Technicolor: Race, Technology and Everyday Life," one of the first scholarly works to examine the racial politics of contemporary technoculture. Her book "Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination" was praised by "Publishers Weekly" as deserving "commendation for its thoughtfulness and thoroughness," was noted as "a much-needed and major work that will  set the standard for scholars" by the "American Historical Review", and was hailed by leading scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. as "a revelation" and "a tremendously important book." "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. This book was recognized with several awards, including the Mirra Komarovsky book award. Nelson has written extensively about genetics, genomics and racialization. She is co-editor with Keith Wailoo and Catherine Lee of "Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and  History", published in 2012. In 2016, she published the landmark book, "The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation After the Genome". "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." Writer Isabel Wilkerson hailed the book as the work of "one of this generation's most gifted scholars." "The Social Life of DNA" received honorable mention  for the 2021 Diana Forsythe book award, 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". Her writing and commentary have appeared in "The New York Times", "The Washington Post", "The Boston Globe", "The Guardian" (London) and "The Chronicle of Higher Education", among other publications. Awards and honors. Nelson has received several awards, honors, and distinctions over the course of her career: 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. 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, co-educational college preparatory school. Nelson is married to Garraud Etienne, a non-profit executive. She was previously married to Ben Williams, a digital editor at GQ and New York Magazine; she was subsequently romantically linked to legal scholar Randall Kennedy for several years