Dr. Ajunwa is the author of the book, The Quantified Worker, forthcoming in 2023 from Cambridge University Press. She is a Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project (ISP). She was a Fulbright Scholar (2021-2022), an award-winning tenured law professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law, and an adjunct Associate Professor at the Kenan-Flagler School of Business where she is a Rethinc. lab Fellow. She is also the Founding Director of the Artificial Intelligence Decision-Making Research (AI-DR) Program at UNC Law and a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University since 2017.
Dr. Ajunwa is a 2019 recipient of the NSF CAREER Award and a 2018 recipient of the Derrick A. Bell Award from the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). Previously, she was an Associate professor in the Labor Relations, Law, and History Department of Cornell University’s Industrial and Labor Relations School (ILR) where she received the Junior Faculty Champion Award from Cornell University and earned tenure in 2020. She is also a certified Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) expert and consultant since 2020. Dr. Ajunwa is a Founding Board Member of the Labor Tech Research Network which is an international group of scholars committed to the research of the ethics of AI used in the workplace and for labor. She has previously served as a Board member for the Institute for Africa Development (IAD) and for the Cornell Prison Education Program (CPEP). She has also consulted or served on advisory boards for major tech corporations.
Dr. Ajunwa’s scholarly articles have been published or are forthcoming in both top law review and peer reviewed publications. Dr. Ajunwa has been invited to testify before the U.S. Congress (House Committee on Education and Labor), and governmental agencies such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (the EEOC), and has served as a keynote speaker at several national and international conferences. Dr. Ajunwa is currently a Contributor for Forbes. Her writing has also been published in other media such as the NY Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the Harvard Business Review, the ACLU Blog, etc. Dr. Ajunwa earned a Ph.D. in Sociology at Columbia University in the City of New York (emphasis on Organizational Theory and Law and Society) where she was a Paul F. Lazersfeld Fellow. Prior to graduate school, she also earned a law degree from the University of San Francisco School of Law where she received the AAUW Selected Professions Fellowship and the Frank C. Newman Fellowship for International Law. She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of California, Davis where she was a McNair Scholar.
Recent News
- Interviewed by Bloomberg regarding forthcoming book, The Quantified Worker, November 14, 2022
- Interviewed by Marketplace regarding privacy implications of in-home smart devices, July 29, 2021.
- Published my first review for JOTWELL, July 9, 2021.
- Gave a speech: “Making Black Lives Matter in Business” at the UN Working Group, Business for Peace, May 27, 2021.
- Gave a keynote speech: A Veil of Ignorance for Automated Decision-Making, at the AI Ethics and Society Conference, May 20, 2021
- Joined UNC School of Law as Associate Law Professor (with tenure) and Founding Director of the AI Decision-Making Research Program, January 1st, 2021.
- Became a Founding Board Member of the Labor Tech Research Network, December 14, 2020.
- Published COVID-19 Immunity as Passport to Work Will Increase Economic Inequality, in the Harvard Law Bill of Health, December 2, 2020.
- Gave Keynote lecture for International Associate of Privacy Professionals (IAAP), December 1st, 2020.
- Published How COVID-19 Could Enable the Inclusion of Women, in Ms. Magazine, November 20th, 2020.
- Published The COVID-19 Crisis Could be a Bane or a Boon for the Inclusion of Women in the Workplace, for Forbes.com, November 6th, 2020.
- Interviewed by Harvard Business Digital Initiative and Gender Initiative, November 4th, 2020.
- Published 10 Reasons Why Anti-Racism Training is Not the Problem, for Forbes.com, September 5th, 2020.
- Served as a Panelist for Aspen Re-Imagining Work Panel, July 1st, 2020.
- Earned tenure and promoted to Associate Professor at Cornell Industrial and Labor Relations School, June 22nd, 2020.
- Presented “Automated Employment Discrimination at Privacy Law Scholars Conference. June 1-2, 2020
- Attended paper workshop at UCLA AI Law and Policy Program, February 26th to 28th, 2020.
- Testified in Congress as expert witness for the United States House of Representatives Committee On Education And Labor Joint Hearing Of Subcommittee On Civil Rights And Human Services Hearing on The Future of Work: Protecting Workers’ Civil Rights in the Digital Age, Washington D.C., February 5th, 2020. video
- Quoted in Fortune Magazine article, “A.I. is transforming the job interview—and everything after,” January 20th, 2020.
- Attended Radcliffe Seminar on The Ethics of Technology: Beyond Privacy and Safety, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, January 8th-9th
- Quoted in Wall Street Journal article, “Future of Everything,” January 7th, 2020.
- Delivered Keynote at Pacific Bio-Computing Symposium, First, Do No Harm – the Evil of Genetic Determinism, The Big Island, Hawaii, January 6th, 2020
- Presented “The Paradox of Automation as Anti-Bias Intervention” at Wharton, Legal Ethics Department, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, November 14th, 2019.
- Interviewed for NPR On Point radio program regarding video interviewing, “Your AI Interviewer Will See you Now,” Boston, MA, October 30th, 2019.
- Published Op-ed in the NY Times, “Beware of Automated Hiring,” October 8th, 2019.
- Invited presentation, “Paradox of Automation,” Third Annual Junior Faculty Colloquium on Law and STEM, Stanford Law School, Palo Alto, California, September 28th, 2019.
- Invited speaker, “Data, Employees, and Privacy,” National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD), Washington, D.C., September 24, 2019.
- Invited presentation of “Paradox of Automation” at Em-Lyon Business School AIM Research Center for Work and Organization, Lyon, France, September 16th, 2019.
- Invited presentation, “Paradox of Automation” at University of Toronto Centre for Ethics, Toronto, Canada, September 10th, 2019.
- Served as Chair/Discussant and presented research on wearable tech at Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S) conference, New Orleans, Louisiana, September 5th and 7th, 2019.
- Received the NSF CAREER Award – $526,878, September 4th, 2019
- Presented research at workshop on “Worker Privacy Concerns” at Georgetown Law School, Washington, D.C, July 9, 2019.
- Delivered a keynote lecture at the Connected Life Conference at St. Anne’s Oxford University, Oxford, England, June 24th, 2019.
- Served as panelist for Aspen Institute Workshop on AI and Bias, Aspen Institute, Berlin, Germany, June 4th, 2019.
- Served as Discussant for McGinnon Book Talk award for Virginia Eubank’s “Automating Inequality,” Fordham Law School, New York City, New York, May 3rd, 2019.
- Invited presentation of “The Paradox of Automation as Anti-Bias Intervention” at CornellTech, Roosevelt Island, NY, May 2nd, 2019
- Invited presentation of “The Paradox of Automation as Anti-Bias Intervention” at Yale Law School, March 28th, 2019.
- Served as discussant at “Algorithms, Big Data, and Contracting” symposium of University of Pennsylvania Law School, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, January 11th, 2019.
- Received the Derrick A. Bell Award at AALS in New Orleans, Louisiana, January 5th, 2019.
- Presented on panel, “Automatic Discrimination” as part of Employment Law section, AALS, New Orleans, Louisiana, January 4th, 2019.
- Presented on panel, “Consumer Protection, Bias, and Discrimination” at Attorney General Tech conference at Harvard Law School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, December 14th, 2018.
- Presented on panel for workshop, “AI for the Social Good” at the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference, Montreal, Canada, December 8th, 2018.
- Presented paper at University of Chicago Law School’s Public Law & Legal Theory Workshop, Chicago, Illinois, October, 30th, 2018.
- Panelist at the Program on Corporate Compliance and Enforcement at NYU School of Law, New York City, New York, October 12, 2018.
- Presented paper at the People and Organizations Conference at The Wharton School, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, September 28th-29th, 2018.
- Interviewed by the Wall Street Journal for a video report on automated interviewing of job applicants, video available here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/artificial-intelligence-the-robots-are-now-hiring-moving-upstream-1537435820
- Appointed Keeton House Fellow at Cornell University for 2018-2019
- Attended an invited workshop at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard Law School discussing ethics for platform design, Cambridge, Massachusetts, July 30th-31st, 2018.
- Gave a keynote at the Machine Design for Social Good Workshop at the 19th ACM Conference on Economics and Computing at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, June 22, 2018.
- Presented my research at an invited conference, “Digital Technologies and Work,” at Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations, New Brunswick, New Jersey, May 21-22, 2018.
- Gave a TEDx Cornell Talk, “Controversies in the Management of the Modern Workplace: Ethics and Technology” at Statler Auditorium, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, May 6th, 2018 (See video below!).
- Gave an invited talk at Boston University Questrom School of Business, Boston, Massachusetts, April 25, 2018.
- Presented the closing keynote at Sage Assembly (video below), Seattle, Washington, April 21, 2018.
- Op-ed, The Rise of Platform Authoritarianism was published on the ACLU Blog, 2018, April 10, 2018.
- Op-ed, Facebook Users Aren’t the Reason Facebook is in Trouble Now was published in The Washington Post, March 23, 2018.
- Presented my research, “Platforms at Work” at the Tech Law & Policy Colloquium at Georgetown Law, Washington, D.C., March 19, 2018.
- Presented my research, “Algorithms at Work” at an invited symposium, “Law, Technology, and the Organization of Work” held by the Wefel Center for Employment Law at St. Louis Law School, St. Louis, Missouri, March 2, 2018.
- Spoke at an invited workshop, “Beyond Intermediary Liability: The Future of Information Platforms,” held by the Yale Information Society Project (ISP) at Yale Law School, New Haven, Connecticut, February, 13, 2018.
- Spoke at an invited symposium held by the AARP “The ADEA at 50” at UC Berkeley School of Law, Berkeley, California, November 17, 2017.
- Presented research at Mind to Mind Conference at Stanford University, October 20, 2017.
- Gave the closing plenary address at WORK2017 Conference, Turku, Finland, August, 18th, 2017.
- Presented my paper, “Questioning the Brokerage Metaphor: Examining the Role of Reentry Organizations” at the Academy of Management Conference, Atlanta, August 8th, 2017
- Op-ed, Corporate Surveillance is Turning Human Workers into Fungible Cogs was published in the The Atlantic May 19, 2017
- Invited participant for a workshop, “Technology and the Self” hosted by the Academy of Arts and Sciences and Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts, May 10, 2017.
- Invited attendee of the Harvard Business School Digital Initiative Summit, Cambridge, April 12-13, 2017.
- Gave a talk at Harvard Law School on what universities should do with their intellectual property, Cambridge, Massachusetts, March 27th, 2017.
- Participated on a panel at LibrePlanet conference at MIT on the issue of ethics for algorithms, Cambridge, Massachusetts, March 26th, 2017.
- Presented on a panel at SXSW on legal and ethical issues regarding the collection of employee health data as part of workplace wellness programs, Austin, Texas March 13, 2017.
- Took part in panel at PRIM&R’s workshop on human subject research focusing on the use of genetic information and health data collected outside of the clinical space, Cambridge, Massachusetts, March 1, 2017.
- Invited to testify before the EEOC Commission regarding Big Data and Employment Discrimination, Washington, D.C., October 13, 2016.
- Presented “Limitations of American Health Law for Health Information Exchange,” in an Advanced Seminar on Health Information Exchange at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University: “Exchanging Health Information: Setting an Interdisciplinary Research Agenda.” Cambridge, Massachusetts, September 22-23, 2016.
- Presented A Contractual Escape Clause For the Third Party Doctrine, at the New Scholars Workshop, Southeastern Association of Law Schools (SEALS) conference, Amelia Island, Florida, August 07, 2016.
- Successfully defended my dissertation, Brokering Freedom, at Columbia University, July 15, 2016.
- Presented my paper, “Hiring by Algorithm,” at the Lutie Lytle Writing Workshop at Iowa Law School, July 8, 2016.
- Presented my paper, “Brokering Freedom: Examining the Social Value of Reentry Organizations in the U.S. Neoliberal economy” at the Buffett Institute of Northwestern University, June 20, 2016.
- Gave the closing keynote lecture at the Health Privacy Rights Summit at Georgetown Law on June 8, 2016,
- Presented an article and served as a discussant for panel, “Risk, Liability, & Norms in a Digital Age,” at the Law and Society Annual Meeting in New Orleans, June 4, 2016.
- Presented Limitless Worker Surveillance, at the Privacy Law Scholars Conference, George Washington University Law School, D.C., June 2, 2016.
- Presented research on solutions to hiring bias by automated hiring platforms to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (the CFPB) on May 9, 2016.
- Presented a talk Using AI to Reduce Bias in Hiring, at Google Re:Work Conference at Google Headquarters in Mountainview, CA, April 28, 2016.
- Invited to The White House for #Reentryweek launch of initiatives by Attorney General Loretta Lynch aimed at reintegrating the formerly incarcerated into the labor market, Washington, D.C., April 27, 2016.
- Moderated the academic panel for Solutions to Post-Incarceration Employment and Entrepreneurship: The Role of Businesses and Universities, hosted by the Tamer Center for Social Enterprise at Columbia Business School, April 22, 2016.
- Presented Hiring by Algorithm, at the Yale Information Society Conference, New Haven, Connecticut, April 2, 2016.
- Quoted in The Guardian: “Wellness programs at work: could your boss be spying on your health?,” February 29, 2016.
- Presented “Commercial DNA Collection and the Third Party Doctrine” at the Future Frontiers of Online Privacy Conference Hosted by the University of Toronto School of Law, January 23, 2016.