Safiya Noble

Safiya Umoja Noble is the David O. Sears presidential endowed chair of social sciences and professor of gender studies, African American studies, and information studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She is the director of the UCLA Center on Race & Digital Justice and co-director of the Minderoo Initiative on Tech & Power at the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2). She serves as interim director of the UCLA DataX Initiative, leading work in critical data studies.

Noble is the author of a bestselling book on racist and sexist algorithmic harm in commercial search engines, entitled Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York University Press), which has been widely reviewed in scholarly and popular publications. In 2021, she was recognized as a MacArthur Fellow for her groundbreaking work on algorithmic bias.

She is a board member of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, which serves those vulnerable to online harassment, and provides expertise to a number of civil and human rights organizations. She is a research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute, where she is a chartering member of the International Panel on the Information Environment. In 2022, she was recognized as the inaugural NAACP-Archewell Digital Civil Rights Award recipient.

She was appointed a commissioner to the University of Oxford Commission on Artificial Intelligence and Good Governance in 2020. In 2020 she was nominated to the Global Future Council on Artificial Intelligence for Humanity at the World Economic Forum.