Kim Gallon is an associate professor of Africana Studies at Brown University. Her work investigates the relationship between technology, race, and health equity. She is the author of Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press (University of Illinois Press, 2020) and the field-defining article “Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities.” She is also the founder and director of two black digital humanities projects: The Black Press Research Collective and COVID Black.

Gallon is a member of the inaugural (2022 – 2024) cohort of the Just Tech Fellowship. As a Just Tech Fellow, Gallon will apply the lenses of critical race theory, black digital humanities, and the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition Principles to reveal the ways that Health IT–—the electronic systems that healthcare professionals and patients use to store, share, and analyze health data and information–—can perpetuate and even exacerbate health inequities. By investigating the intersections between the healthcare industry and health IT legislation, such as the HIPPA Act of 1996 and HITECH Act of 2009, Gallon intends to reveal the structural racism and brute capitalism embedded at their core. Her project will produce a series of workshops and a digital toolkit of health IT resources co-created with Black communities in Baltimore and Providence.