Alondra Nelson

Alondra Nelson (born April 22, 1968^{[citation needed]}) is an American academic, policy advisor, non-profit administrator, and writer. 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, she was nominated by the Biden-Harris Administration and appointed by United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres 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 performed the duties of the director from February to October 2022. She was the first African American and first woman of color to lead OSTP. Prior to her role in the Biden Administration, she served for four years as president and CEO of the Social Science Research Council, an independent, nonpartisan international nonprofit organization. Nelson was previously professor of sociology at Columbia University, 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 academic career on the faculty of Yale University.

She has authored or edited articles, essays, and books including The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome (2016).

In 1994, Nelson earned a Bachelor of Science degree in anthropology, magna cum laude, from the University of California, San Diego. While there, she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She earned a Ph.D. in American studies from New York University in 2003. Nelson has received honorary degrees from Amherst College, Northeastern University, Rutgers University, and the City College of New York.

From fall 1999 to spring 2001, Nelson was the New York University Minority Dissertation Fellow in the Department of American Studies at Skidmore College.

From 2003 to 2009, Nelson 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 (now the Institute for Gender and Sexuality), founded the Columbia University Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Council, and served as the first 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, the Precision Medicine and Society 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, "the Princeton, New Jersey, organization that once housed the likes of Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer."

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 research, and the study of inequality, including: the Social Data Initiative, "an ambitious research project that aimed to give academics access to troves of Facebook data in order to examine the platform's impact on democracy," the Just Tech Fellowship, MediaWell, a misinformation and disinformation research platform, 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.