Alondra Nelson
*Alondra Nelson was born on this date in 1968. She is a Black academic, policy advisor, nonprofit administrator, and writer.
Raised in Southern California in 1994, Nelson earned a Bachelor of Science in anthropology from the University of California, San Diego. While there, she was an early leader in dialogue on Afrofuturism, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and earned a Ph.D. in American studies from New York University in 2003. 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. Since March 2023, she has been a distinguished senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
In October 2023, the Biden-Harris Administration nominated her, and United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres appointed her to the UN High-Level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence. From 2021 to 2023, Nelson was deputy assistant to President Joe Biden and principal deputy director for science and society of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), where she was the first African American and woman of color to lead OSTP.
Before her role in the Biden Administration, Nelson served four years as president and CEO of the Social Science Research Council, an independent, nonpartisan international nonprofit organization. She was previously a professor of sociology at Columbia University, where she served as the inaugural Dean of Social Science and director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. She began her academic 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, most recently The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome.
