Alondra Nelson is 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, Gender, and Sexuality. She is also the fourteenth president of the Social Science Research Council.  Chair of the American Sociological Association Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology, she is an elected member of the Sociological Research Association. Prior to joining Columbia in 2009, Nelson was on the faculty of Yale University, where she received the Poorvu Award for interdisciplinary teaching excellence.

Professor Nelson is an interdisciplinary social scientist whose research focuses on how science and its applications may shape the social world, including aspects of personal identification, racial formation, and collective action. In turn, she also explores the ways in which social groups reject, challenge, engage and, in some instances, adopt and mobilize concepts derived from scientific and technical domains.

Her most recent book, The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome (Beacon Press, 2016), traces how claims about ancestry are marshaled together with genetic analysis in a range of social ventures. Nelson is also the author of Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), the first book-length exploration of the social movement organization’s health-focused activities which details its engagement with genetic disease and racial essentialism in science. She recently began new ethnographic research that examines grassroots responses to the STEM-field crisis as well as a book-length study of science and technology policy in the Obama administration.

Nelson’s research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Professor Nelson was an external fellow at the W.E.B Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. She has also been a visiting fellow at the BIOS Centre at the London School of Economics, the Bavarian-American Academy, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.

Alondra has contributed to national policy discussions on inequality, and about the social implications of new technologies, including artificial intelligence, big data, direct-to-consumer genetics, and human gene-editing. She served on the NSF-sponsored Council on Big Data, Ethics, and Society. She is a member of the World Economic Forum Network on Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of Things, and the Future of Trust, sits on the editorial boards of Social Studies of Science and Public Culture, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Data & Society Research Institute.

Her essays, reviews, and commentary have appeared in the Washington Post, Science, Boston Globe, and on National Public Radio, among other venues.