Director of Research

Jenna Burrell

Jenna Burrell is Data & Society’s Director of Research. She oversees all aspects of our research program at Data & Society, ensuring the rigor and integrity of our work. Before joining D&S she was a professor at the School of Information at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on how marginalized communities adapt digital technologies to meet their needs and to pursue their goals and ideals. At Berkeley she was the co-director of the Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Group (AFOG) which brought together faculty and students from across campus to facilitate research on how algorithmic systems can be designed, used, or regulated to support more equitable and just societies. Burrell is the author of Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafes of Urban Ghana (MIT Press). These days she spends a lot of time thinking about ways of protecting human control and autonomy in the wake of artificial intelligence and the possibilities for democratizing tech. She earned a PhD in Sociology from the London School of Economics and a BA in Computer Science from Cornell University.