Ruha Benjamin is a professor in the Department of African American studies at Princeton University where she studies the social dimensions of science, technology, and medicine. She is also the founding director of the IDA B. WELLS Just Data Lab, and a faculty associate in the Center for Information Technology Policy, Program on History of Science, Center for Health and Wellbeing, and Program on Gender and Sexuality Studies. She serves on the executive committees of the Program in Global Health and Health Policy and Center for Digital Humanities.

Ruha’s first book, People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (Stanford 2013), investigates the social dimensions of stem cell science with a particular focus on the tension between innovation and inequity. Her second book, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Polity 2019) examines the relationship between machine bias and systemic racism, analyzing specific cases of “discriminatory design” and offering tools for a socially-conscious approach to tech development. She also edited a volume titled Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life (Duke 2019), which brings together an incredible group of scholars to explore the interplay between innovation and containment across a wide array of social arenas, past and present. Ruha’s fourth book, Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (Princeton 2022) offers a passionate and pragmatic vision of how small changes can add up to large ones, transforming our relationships and communities, and helping us build a more just and joyful world.

Ruha Benjamin served on the Steering Committee that informed the creation of the Just Tech Fellowship.