Alondra Nelson
American sociologist
Follow Alondra Nelson on Notably News to receive short updates to your email — rarely!
| 2025 | Awarded the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Humanitarian Award from NYU, NAACP-Archewell Digital Civil Rights Award at the 56th NAACP Image Awards, and an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Amherst College. |
| 2024 | Received multiple honors: World Leader in AI World Society Award, Dorothy Irene Height Award/Global Trailblazer Award from NYU, Alumni Changemaker Award from UC San Diego, named a Tech Titan by Washingtonian Magazine, and received the Morals & Machines Award. |
| October 15 2024 | President Biden announced her appointment to the National Science Board of the National Science Foundation. |
| 2023 | Received multiple prestigious awards: Champion of Freedom Award from Electronic Privacy Information Center, Sage-CASBS Award from Stanford University, Inaugural Friedrich Schiedel Prize from Technical University of Munich, recognized as a Time 100 Most Influential People in AI, and received the Federation of American Scientists Public Service Award. |
| October 2023 | Nominated by the Biden-Harris Administration and appointed by UN Secretary-General António Guterres to the UN High-Level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence. |
| March 2023 | Becomes a distinguished senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. |
| February 2023 | Concluded her public service leave from the Institute for Advanced Study, ending her tenure at OSTP. |
| 2022 | Received an honorary Doctor of Science from Rutgers University and named one of Nature's 10 People Who Shaped Science. |
| October 3 2022 | Swore in Arati Prabhakar as the U.S. Senate-confirmed director of OSTP, concluding her role as acting director. |
| February 17 2022 | President Joe Biden appointed Nelson as acting director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), making her the first Black person and first woman of color to lead OSTP in its 46-year history. |
| 2021 | Awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from CUNY: The City College of New York and elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. |
| 2021 | Received honorable mention for the Diana Forsythe Book Award for 'The Social Life of DNA'. |
| 2021 | Completed tenure as SSRC president, with her leadership being hailed as 'transformative'. |
| January 2021 | Appointed as OSTP deputy director for science and society, praised as a distinguished scholar with significant insights into genetics, social inequality, and medical discrimination. |
| 2020 | Received multiple honors: Named among Top 35 Women in Higher Education by Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, received Honorable Mention for the Diana Forsythe Prize, awarded the Morison Prize from MIT, and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Philosophical Society, and National Academy of Medicine. |
| June 2019 | Left Columbia University faculty to assume the Harold F. Linder chair and professorship at the Institute for Advanced Study. |
| 2018 | Elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and The Hastings Center. |
| 2017 | Elected to Membership in the Sociological Research Association and named a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Nonfiction for her book 'The Social Life of DNA'. |
| 2017 | Book 'The Social Life of DNA' was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Nonfiction. |
| 2017 | Served as a juror for the inaugural Aspen Words Literary Prize. |
| February 2017 | Selected as the 14th president and CEO of the Social Science Research Council, becoming the first African American, first person of color, and second woman to lead the organization. |
| 2016 | Published 'The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation After the Genome', a landmark book about genetic ancestry testing in Black communities. |
| October 2016 | Co-curated a special issue of the American Journal of Public Health focused on the Black Panther Party's health legacy. |
| 2013 | Received the Just Wellness Award from the Third Root Community Health Center for 'Body and Soul', recognized for work at the intersection of healing and social justice. |
| 2012 | Received multiple awards for her book 'Body and Soul', including the Mirra Komarovsky Book Award, American Sociological Association Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award, Letitia Woods Brown Award, and Best Book Award from the Association for Humanist Sociology. Also named a finalist for the C. Wright Mills Award. |
| 2012 | Co-edited the book 'Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History' with Keith Wailoo and Catherine Lee. |
| 2011 | Appointed Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. |
| 2011 | Published 'Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination', a highly acclaimed scholarly work praised by Publishers Weekly, the American Historical Review, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. |
This contents of the box above is based on material from the Wikipedia article Alondra Nelson, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.