Safiya Noble

Safiya Umoja Noble is David O. Sears Presidential Chair in Social Sciences. She is a professor in the department of gender studies, director of the Center on Resilience and Digital Justice at UCLA and co-director of the Minderoo Initiative on Tech and Power at the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry. She also serves as the interim director of the UCLA DataX Initiative. Her academic background is in information sciences, gender studies and African American studies.

Noble’s research focuses on the design of digital media and its impact on society, as well as how digital technology and artificial intelligence intersect with issues of race, gender, culture and power. She is the author of the bestselling book “Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism” (2018), which examines racist and sexist algorithmic bias in commercial search engines.

Noble has served as a commissioner for the Oxford Commission on AI and Good Governance, which advises world leaders on effective ways to use AI and machine learning in public administration and governance. She regularly serves on federal, state and municipal advisory councils dedicated to mitigating the negative impacts and biases of AI and is regarded as one of the foremost experts on algorithmic and online discrimination and bias in the technology industry. 

Noble is a board member of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, which fights online abuses, and provides expertise to a number of civil and human rights organizations. She is a research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford, where she is a chartering member of the International Panel on the Information Environment, supported by the Nobel Commission. In 2022, she was recognized as the inaugural recipient of the NAACP-Archewell Digital Civil Rights Award and was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship in 2021.