Ifeoma Ajunwa

Ajunwa received her BA at University of California, Davis in 2003, her JD at University of San Francisco School of Law in 2007, and her MPhil and PhD in Sociology at Columbia University in 2012 and 2017, respectively.[10][11] Ajunwa was a McNair Scholar as an undergraduate student, received an AAUW Selected Professions Fellowship in law school, and was a Paul F. Lazersfeld Fellow as a PhD student.[11] Ajunwa's PhD thesis was advised by Josh Whitford.[12][13]

Ajunwa is a prolific writer, legal scholar, AI ethics researcher, and tenured professor of law at the University of North Carolina School Of Law where she serves as the Founding Director of the AI Decision-Making Research (AI-DR) Program.[4] Prior to that, Ajunwa was a professor at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations[7] and an associate faculty member at Cornell Law School.[10] She is a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University,[14] where previously she was a Fellow from 2016-2017 and a Teaching Fellow at Harvard Law School,.[10][15] She also served as a Microsoft Research NYC Research Intern in 2015.[11]

Ajunwa's research interests are at the intersection of law and technology with a particular focus on  the ethical governance of workplace technologies, race and tech, corporate governance, and health equity and privacy. Her research focus is also on diversity and inclusion in the labor market and the workplace.[10] She will publish a book - "The Quantified Worker" - with Cambridge University Press.[16][17]

Ajunwa was awarded tenure by Cornell University on May 22, 2020.[18] On February 5, 2020, Ajunwa testified at a U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor hearing on "The Future of Work: Protecting Workers' Civil Rights in the Digital Age". She discussed artificial intelligence-enabled racial bias in hiring practices and advocated for legislation protecting personal and genetic data privacy in the workplace.[19][20] On May 6, 2018, Ajunwa was a TEDx Speaker at Cornell University where she presented a talk on the Controversies of Ethics and Technology in the Modern Workplace.[21] At Cornell, Ajunwa has served as a board member on several advisory boards, including for the Institute for Africa Development[22] and the Cornell Prison Education Program (CPEP).[23] Recently, Ajunwa was awarded a Fulbright to study legal issues related to tech start-ups in Nigeria.[24]

Ajunwa's awards and honors include:

• 2006: AAUW Selected Professions Fellowship
• 2010: Paul F. Lazersfeld Fellow, Columbia University
• 2016-2017: Fellow, Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University[25]
• 2018: Derrick A. Bell Award from the Association of American Law Schools[7][17]
• 2018-2019: Keeton House Fellow, Cornell University[26]
• 2019: NSF CAREER Award[27][28][29]
• 2020: Faculty Champion Award, Cornell University [30]
• 2021-2022: Fulbright Scholar (host country: Nigeria)[24]
• 2022 - : Visiting Fellow, Yale Law School's Information Society Project[31]

Ajunwa's scholarly writing includes:

For Law review:[32]

1. An Auditing Imperative for Automated Hiring Systems, 34 Harv. J.L. & Tech. 1 (2021).
2. The Paradox of Automation as Anti-Bias Intervention, 41 Cardozo. L. Rev.1671(2020).
3. Age Discrimination by Platforms, 40 Berkeley J. Emp. & Lab. L.1 (2019).
4. Algorithms at Work: Productivity Monitoring Applications and Wearable Technology, 63 St. Louis U. L.J. 21 (2019).Ife
5. Combatting Discrimination Against the Formerly Incarcerated in the Labor Market, 112 Nw. U. L. Rev. 1385 (2018). (with Professor Angela Onwuachi-Willig).
6. Limitless Worker Surveillance, 105 Cal. L. Rev. 736 ( 2017) (with Professors Jason Schultz and Kate Crawford).
7. Genetic Data and Civil Rights, 51 Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 75 (2016).
8. The Modern Day Scarlet Letter, 83 Fordham L. Rev. 2999 (2015).
9. Genetic Testing Meets Big Data: Tort and Contract Law Issues, 75 Ohio St. L. J. 1225 (2014).
10. Bad Barrels: An Organizational-Based Analysis of Human Rights Abuses Within the American Carceral System, 17 U. PA. J. L. & Soc. Change 75 (2014).

For Peer Review and Other Publications:[32]

1. “Race, Labor, and the Future of Work,” Oxford Handbook of Race and Law in the United States, Eds. Devon Carbado, Emily Houh, and Khiara Bridges (invited Contribution) (forthcoming 2020)
2. “The Black Box at Work” Special Issue of Big Data and Society, Eds. Frank Pasquale and Benedetta Brevini (invited Contribution) (forthcoming 2020)
3. Evolving public views on the value of one’s DNA and expectations for genomic database governance: Results from a national survey Briscoe F, Ajunwa I, Gaddis A, McCormick J (2020) PLOS ONE 15(3): e0229044. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0229044
4. “Platforms at Work: Automated Hiring Platforms and Other New Intermediaries in the Organization of the Workplace.” (with Daniel Greene) In Work and Labor in the Digital Age. Research in the Sociology of Work. Published online: 14 Jun 2019; 61-91.
5. Ajunwa, I. & Caplan, R. (2018). DNA Technology. SAGE Encyclopedia of Surveillance, Security and Privacy. (invited contribution).
6. “Health and Big Data: An Ethical Framework for Health Information Collection By Corporate Wellness Programs”, Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics, 44 (2016): 474-480 (with Kate Crawford and Joel Ford).

Ajunwa's public media writing includes:[32]

• Ifeoma Ajunwa, "The Power of Ketanji Brown Jackson's African Name," Slate, March 24, 2022[33]
• Ifeoma Ajunwa, "Can We Trust Corporate Commitments to Racial Equity?", Forbes, February 23, 2021[34]
• Ifeoma Ajunwa, Forrest Briscoe, "The Answer to a COVID-19 Vaccine May Lie in Our Genes, But ...", Scientific American, May 13, 2020[35]
• Ifeoma Ajunwa, "Beware of Automated Hiring", The New York Times, October 8, 2019[36]
• Ifeoma Ajunwa, "The Rise of Platform Authoritarianism", ACLU, April 10, 2018[37]
• Ifeoma Ajunwa, "Facebook users aren’t the reason Facebook is in trouble now", Washington Post, March 23, 2018[38]
• Ifeoma Ajunwa, "Corporate Surveillance Is Turning Human Workers Into Fungible Cogs", The Atlantic, May 19, 2017[39]
• Ifeoma Ajunwa, "Workplace Wellness Programs Could Be Putting Your Health Data at Risk", Harvard Business Review, January 19, 2017[40]
• Ifeoma Ajunwa, "A call to 'ban the box' on college applications", Washington Examiner, November 10, 2015[41]
• Ifeoma Ajunwa, "The other big US Supreme Court decision we should be celebrating is one no one’s talking about", Quartz, June 29, 2015[42]
• Ifeoma Ajunwa, "There’s No Guarantee of Anonymity", The New York Times, March 4, 2015[43]
• Ifeoma Ajunwa, "Do You Know Where Your Health Data Is?", Huffington Post, February 13, 2015[44]
• Ifeoma Ajunwa, "For Ebola Response - Think Infrastructure, Not Donations", Huffington Post, November 30, 2014[45]
• Ifeoma Ajunwa, "West Africa Does Not Need Your Donations to Fight Ebola", Huffington Post, November 13, 2014[46]

• "Some Companies Are Turning To Tracking Technologies To Ensure Safe Reopening", NPR All Things Considered, May 7, 2020[47]
• "You’re Working From Home, but Your Company Is Still Watching You", The Wall Street Journal, April 18, 2020[48]
• "Present Value: ILR’s Ifeoma Ajunwa on the ethical challenges of technology in the workplace", Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, July 25, 2019[49]
• "Ethical Challenges with Technology in the Workplace", Present Value Podcast, July 8, 2019[50]
• "The Quantified Worker and Worker Surveillance with Ifeoma Ajunwa", Yale Podcast Network, April 9, 2019[51]
• "Cornell Professor Ifeoma Ajunwa Discusses Artificial Intelligence Used In Hiring", NPR, April 8, 2019[52]
• "Controversies of Ethics & Technology in Modern Workplace", Cornell TEDx Talks, December 3, 2018[53]
• "The Way We Work: How can we protect data privacy?", Humanyze, 2018[54]

• Ifeoma Ajunwa publications indexed by Google Scholar
• "Ifeoma Ajunwa – Writer, Professor". Retrieved 18 June 2020.
• "NSF Award Search: Advanced Search Results - Ifeoma Ajunwa". National Science Foundation. Retrieved 18 June 2020.