Alondra Nelson

Alondra Nelson (born April 22, 1968) 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.

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.

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.

In 1994, Nelson earned a Bachelor of Science degree in anthropology, magna cum laude, from the University of California, San Diego, in 1994.

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

While there, she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa She earned a Ph.D. in American studies from New York University in 2003.

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.

From 2014 to 2017, Nelson was the academic curator for the YWCA of New York City and was also a member of its program committee.

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.

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 is a member of the board of the Harlem-based youth development organization, the Brotherhood/Sister Sol.

Nelson was a member of the board for African-American Affairs at Monticello.

She serves on the advisory board of the Obama Presidency Oral History Project.

Nelson was a juror for the inaugural Aspen Words Literary Prize in 2017.

She served as a juror for the Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program from 2018 to 2021.

Nelson has been elected to 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 life 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.

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."

Nelson is past chair of the American Sociological Association's Science, Knowledge, and Technology section; from 2020 to 2021, she was president-elect of the international scholarly association, the Society for Social Studies of Science, 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, the Bayreuth Academy, and the International Center for Advanced Studies at New York University.

On February 17, 2022, President Joe Biden announced that Nelson, whom he'd previously appointed deputy director for science and society in the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), would lead OSTP until permanent leadership could be confirmed.

She was also appointed as deputy assistant to the president at this time.

She was the first Black person and first woman of color to lead OSTP in the office's 46-year history.