Alondra Nelson

Dr. Alondra Nelson serves as the inaugural Deputy Director for Science and Society in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. In this role, she brings social science expertise, including attention to issues of social inequality into the work of Federal science and technology strategy and policy. Since 2019, Nelson is also Harold F. Linder Chair and Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, an independent research center in Princeton, NJ. She was president of the Social Science Research Council, an international research nonprofit from 2017-2021. She was previously taught at Columbia University, where she was the inaugural dean of Social Science and director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and at Yale University, where she was recognized with the Poorvu Award for teaching excellence. Nelson is an interdisciplinary social scientist and an award-winning author, who has published widely-acclaimed books and articles exploring science, technology, medicine, and social inequality. She is exceptional for her intellectual versatility that extends to scholarship in the worlds of biology, medicine, and public health and, an influential scholar in the field of the social studies of science and technology, especially the sociopolitical dimensions of genetics and artificial intelligence.