danah boyd is the Geri Gay Professor of Communication at Cornell University. Dr. boyd's research focuses on the intersection of technology and society, with an eye towards how structural inequities shape and are shaped by technologies. Her upcoming book "Data Are Made, Not Found: A Story of Politics, Power, and the Civil Servants Who Saved the US Census" (University of Chicago Press) is an ethnographic account of the Census Bureau's struggle to make legitimate data in 2020.
Dr. boyd has published multiple books, dozens of papers, hundreds of essays, and given countless talks. Her first monograph "It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens" has received widespread praise from scholars, parents, and journalists and has been translated into 7 languages. She has also done extensive research on tech policy, media manipulation, algorithmic accountability, privacy practices, ethics in computing, responsible AI, future of work, social media/platform studies, and teen culture.
Dr. boyd founded the independent research institute Data & Society, where she currently serves as an advisor. She is a non-residential fellow at the Center for Democracy & Technology. She is also a fellow of AAAS, a trustee of the Computer History Museum, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and on the advisory board of Electronic Privacy Information Center. She was also a founding director of Crisis Text Line, a mental health organization that serves people in crisis. She is also a former trustee of the National Museum of the American Indian and a former director of Social Science Research Council.
Dr. boyd was selected as a 2026 Sloan Research Fellow. She was also honored with the MIT Morison Prize for Science, Technology, and Society in 2023, selected by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to receive a 2019 Pioneer/Barlow Award, and by the American Sociology Association to win the 2010 CITASA Award for Public Sociology. The Financial Times dubbed Dr. boyd "The High Priestess of Internet Friendship" while Fortune Magazine identified her as the smartest academic in tech. She was identified as one of Technology Review's 2010 Young Innovators under 35 (TR35) and selected by the World Economic Forum as a 2011 Young Global Leader.
Dr. boyd received a bachelor's degree in computer science from Brown University (under Andy van Dam), a master's degree from MIT Media Lab (under Judith Donath), and a Ph.D in Information from the University of California, Berkeley in 2008 (under Peter Lyman and Mimi Ito). She has worked as a researcher for various corporations, including Microsoft Research, Intel, Tribe.net, Google, and Yahoo! She also created and managed a large online community for V-Day, a non-profit organization working to end violence against women and girls worldwide. She has previously held fellowships or faculty appointments at Georgetown, USC, Harvard, and New York University.
To read more of her writing, visit her blog at http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/ or check out her tweets @zephoria or read her papers.
