Bridging Science & Society : Dr. Alondra Nelson

In this episode, I interviewed Dr. Alondra Nelson, the ⁠Harold F. Linder Professor⁠ at the ⁠Institute for Advanced Study⁠ in Princeton, New Jersey.

Per her website: Dr. Nelson was formerly deputy assistant to President Joe Biden and acting director of ⁠the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy⁠ (OSTP). In this role, she was the first African American and first woman of color to lead US science and technology policy.

At OSTP, she spearheaded ⁠the development of the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights⁠, issued guidance to ⁠expand tax-payer access to federally-funded research⁠, served as an inaugural member of the Biden ⁠Cancer Cabinet⁠, strengthened ⁠evidence-based policymaking⁠, and galvanized a ⁠multisector strategy to advance equity and excellence in STEM⁠, among other accomplishments. Including her on the global list of “Ten People Who Shaped Science,” ⁠Nature⁠ said of Nelson’s OSTP tenure, “this social scientist made strides for equity, integrity and open access.” In 2023, she was named to the inaugural TIME100 list of the most influential people in the field of AI.

In 2024, Nelson was appointed by President Biden to the National Science Board, the body that establishes the policies of the National Science Foundation and advises Congress and the President. Alondra was also nominated by the White House, and appointed by United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, to serve on the UN High-Level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence.

She also helped lead academic and research strategy at Columbia University, where she was the inaugural Dean of Social Science and professor of sociology and gender studies. Dr. Nelson began her academic career on the faculty of Yale University, and there was recognized with the Poorvu Prize for interdisciplinary teaching excellence.

Dr. Nelson has held visiting professorships and fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the BIOS Centre at the London School of Economics, the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies, and the Bavarian American Academy. Her research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the National Science Foundation.

Nelson has contributed to ⁠national policy discussions⁠ on ⁠inequality⁠ and on the social implications of new technologies, including ⁠artificial intelligence⁠, ⁠big data⁠, and ⁠human gene-editing⁠ in journals like Science. Her essays, reviews, and commentary have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Nature, Foreign Policy, CNN, NPR, BBC Radio, and PBS Newshour, among other venues.

She is an elected member of the ⁠National Academy of Medicine⁠ (NAM), the ⁠American Academy of Arts and Sciences⁠, the ⁠American Philosophical Society⁠, the Council on Foreign Relations, and an elected fellow of the ⁠American Association for the Advancement of Science⁠ and the ⁠American Academy of Political and Social Science⁠. Nelson was co-chair of the NAM ⁠Committee on Emerging Science, Technology, and Innovation⁠ and served as a member of the National Academies of Sciences ⁠Committee on Responsible Computing Research⁠.

She is the recipient of honorary degrees from Northeastern University, Rutgers University, and the City University of New York. Her honors also include the Stanford University Sage-CASBS Award, the MIT Morison Prize, the inaugural TUM Friedrich Schiedel Prize for Social Sciences and Technology, the EPIC Champion of Freedom Award, the Federation of American Scientists Public Service Award, and the Morals & Machines Prize.

Raised in Southern California, Dr. Nelson is a magna cum laude graduate of the University of California at San Diego, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She earned her PhD from New York University in 2003.

Transcription

Transcribed by Katelyn McInerney (she/her)

ALONDRA NELSON: I’m Alondra Nelson. I’m the Harold F. Linder professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, which is a small research center in Princeton, you know, in Princeton, New York. Excuse me, I’m gonna start that over. I’m Alondra Nelson. I’m the Harold F. Linder Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, which is a small research center in Princeton, New Jersey, which is not affiliated with Princeton University, and was the home of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was director here for almost 20 years, which people may be familiar with. I’m a sociologist of science and technology and society and inequality. And I have been, I’m a year out from having served in the Biden-Harris administration for my first stint ever in public service.

JP FLORES: So exciting! I can’t wait to ask you about that later on in the interview. So, you know, would you mind painting a picture of, you know, who you actually are? How are you raised and what your upbringing were like? How did you get into, you know, the field of social science and, you know, talking about things like The Social Life of DNA?

ALONDRA NELSON: Yeah, so I grew up in San Diego, California. Both my parents served in the military for a time, and my mother then, after that, became, was a military cryptographer, and then she went to work for the Department of Defense doing similar work and working on large kind of IBM mainframes and other kinds of computers. And my father was a career person in the military and was a kind of, he worked on aircraft carriers and was a kind of mechanical technician type. So kind of a science and technology family of a sort. And you know, grew up mostly in San Diego, although, you know, lived in Italy as a child for a little bit, actually lived on Cuba for a child, as a child for a little bit, and I have a sibling, two siblings, born in Cuba, another born in Italy, and started grade school in San Diego, I think first grade age six, and had most of my kind of formative education and experience there. Went to UC San Diego for my undergraduate degree and there I, you know, so beginning in I think middle school, as is the case for many of us, I was sort of tracked into sort of both honors and kind of, you know, high achieving student courses. And also was tracked into science. And, you know, I think my parents’ aspirations for me, like for many, like many parents, was to be a doctor. And for a time, I thought my aspiration also was to be a physician, I didn’t, I hadn’t been thinking about bench science, but about being a physician, and going to medical school. And so that was the kind of track that I was on. And then I got to college, and I was much more interested in the kind of social applications and implications of science. And so, you know, in my chemistry class, you know, the form, you know, I was interested in the formulas that were like, you know, that were about sort of carbon in the environment, or about, you know, sort of breaking sort of bonds and hair molecules, like, you know, just all sorts of things that were about like that were much more kind of applied and not even just applied because I could have, you know, there could have been a path there for applied science, but I was actually just interested in like, what all of these inventions, ideas, concepts, models, sort of how they moved in the world, how people made them and thought about them and then how they kind of moved out into the world. At UCSD, I had incredible teachers, including the late astronaut Sally Ride, who was my physics teacher at UCSD. And, you know, even taking a class with her was interesting: this was after her time, you know, sort of having been in space, and so she had kind of amazing photographs and interesting data that she could share. And, you know, my high school physics experience had been like, you know, I heard recently from someone that some physics teachers are still doing this, and I’m so sorry to people who are taking physics like this, but, you know, like, here’s a wagon, it’s got these many bricks in it, they weigh this much, like what’s the vector to get it up this hill or, you know, these sorts of things. And then I had Sally Ride saying, okay, we have got to get this shuttle in orbit, you know, how are we going to calculate the trajectory that we need to like get this like, what is the math of this orbit? And I was just like, that’s fascinating. But I was also, I also thought she’s fascinating. So it just became more, I became more interested in a broader sort of science and its applications in a much broader context. So I ended up studying socio-cultural anthropology at UCSD. That was my major. The interesting thing, which I didn’t appreciate until I left UCSD and sort of went on to graduate school, is that that, at the time, I’m not sure what’s going on there now, at that time that undergraduate anthropology degree was one of the few where you had to study the sort of canonical four fields in anthropology, which means that you had to study social and cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, biological anthropology, and archaeology, right? So that if we, with the sort of theory of the case being, and sort of early anthropology, that if you want to understand human societies and human cultures, you need to understand these kind of four facets of it. So that still meant that I was taking science classes, and it still meant that I actually went on a couple of digs, archeological digs, during my time as an anthropology student. So I was thinking about science in lots of different ways, but science about soil and about sort of carbon dating and these sorts of things. So I ended up in anthropology and I ended up in a place with a degree that helped me to think about those things. And then I became much more interested in the social sciences more generally and sociology in particular.

JP FLORES: Yeah, so how did you make that bridge?

ALONDRA NELSON: So I applied to graduate school. I applied almost exclusively to anthropology programs. So I assumed that I was gonna do a PhD in anthropology. And I applied, I had a couple of, I had great teachers at UCSD: in addition to Sally Ride, I had a wonderful teacher who was a historian named George Lipsitz. And I was applying to my anthropology programs and he said, “You know, there’s this interesting American studies program at NYU that has this whole crop of new faculty who are doing new and interesting things”. And he’s like, “you know, why don’t you just apply there too, if you’re going to apply?” I had thankfully, because I couldn’t have afforded it otherwise, I received a grant from a program at UCSD that paid for my graduate school applications. And he said, “you know, since you’re going to be applying, you have money now to apply, why don’t you apply for this one program?” So I applied, I actually didn’t know what American Studies was, hadn’t heard of, you know, there wasn’t an American Studies program or department at UCSD at the time, I don’t know if there is now. But I looked at the scholars and I read some of the work and these were people like Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose, who’s now at Brown, and Robin Kelly, who’s at UCLA. And I thought like these are amazing, you know, young scholars and folks that I can learn things from. So I applied. And I visited, you know, I was admitted to the anthropology program at Princeton and visited here. I was admitted to the anthropology program at Columbia and visited there. And then I visited this NYU American Studies program where I was also admitted and, for reasons I still don’t quite understand, I was like, yeah, this actually feels right, this feels like a place where I can kind of do what I want to do. And, you know, I think, certainly my father, if not my mother were kind of like, “Are you gonna say no to Princeton and Columbia?” And, you know, the answer was yes, and I ended up going to NYU. So at NYU, you know, you could, it was a bit of a more of a kind of self-directed PhD program, because American studies can be American perspectives on international affairs. It can be, you know, kind of sort of ethnic studies, it can be American history, you know, there’s a lot of different angles you can take on it. And, you know, it was clear, I think, that I was very much taking, wanted to take a social science perspective. And I spent a lot of my time, my self-directed classes, effectively taking sociology, doing the course and, you know, doing sociology graduate courses. And then as I was finishing my work or kind of wrapping up in the last couple of years of my program, the great sociologist Troy Duster came from Berkeley to NYU. And Troy would become, you know, one of my great sort of, you know, mentors and still to this day great mentor and, you know, just real supporter of my work and so that was incredibly helpful and, you know, it was figures like Troy that helped me think that I could have a place for my work, which was a combination of the sociology of science and kind of the sociology of race and ethnicity and medical sociology kind of all together and that that could sort of make sense because he had been trying, you know, he had built a space for that in sociology, you know, over the last kind of other 30 years prior. So that’s how I, so my PhD is actually in American Studies, but my kind of training and orientation, very much sociology. And then my very first job, right out of graduate school, I actually got the call that I received this job sitting – I was auditing a seminar that Troy taught with, co-taught with Emily Martin, the anthropologist. And at the break in the seminar, it was like a three hour grad seminar, I told Troy. So I remember that day very, very much. And so my first job was at Yale. I had a joint appointment in Sociology in the Department of African American Studies. And then a few years later, I was recruited to Columbia, where I took a role in the Department of Sociology there with affiliations in Women and Gender Studies and African American Studies and the Center for Ethnicity and Race.

JP FLORES: Awesome. So I know you’ve had a very decorated career, and it seems like you were a sociologist by training, but I know you’ve worked with a lot of scientists, right? Have you ever felt imposter syndrome because of anything they’ve said or like how have you overcome that? Because, you know, I feel like scientists have this, you know, attitude of being like, “Oh, I’m, I want, I’m like this, I’m trying to be the smartest person in the room,” when really people are just smart in their own ways, right? If you’re a sociologist, you’re an expert in sociology, and you have a unique lens to bring to a scientist. But have you ever, you know, felt imposter syndrome?

ALONDRA NELSON: Oh, I think we all feel it. And I think if someone says that they’re not, that they don’t feel it, I think they’re either very fortunate or being a bit dishonest. But it manifests in very different ways. So the training that I had, my graduate training was, my teacher said to me, if you want to do interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary or cross-disciplinary work, that doesn’t mean you know a little bit about a few things, it actually means you need to learn to be almost bilingual, like you need to know the field and the language and the like. So, in my first book, which was on African American activists, so the 1960s and 70s, the Black Panther Party, in particular, trying to get better health outcomes for that community, through built, you know, trying to set up clinics, but also trying to have a position and intervene in public health practices around sickle cell anemia, which is a, you know, genetic disease that predominantly affects people of African descent, and also to kind of shape the science and the questions that were being asked about that. So that work really meant that I had to learn a lot about genetics. Some of the things the Black Panther Party were saying about genetics, was it true or not true? Was that the current state of science or not the current state of science? What was the current state of science? If it was the case that the Black Panther Party, as they said, were doing genetic testing and screening at clinics and in, you know, community parks and these sorts of things, how technologically was that possible? What technology would have made that possible? Could it have been the case that people who were mostly non-experts, right, who were kind of community-based health workers, could use these tests, could access these tests? So all of these kinds of questions about the political economy of medicine in that moment, the sort of history of sickle cell anemia, and basic, you know, sort of fundamental genetics. And so that meant that it took a long time to finish that book. I finished my PhD in 2003. That book comes out in 2011. I also started The Social Life of DNA in the midst of this, so I was kind of writing those two books simultaneously. But, you know, it was, I think I appreciate that my advisors in graduate school were very clear that doing multidisciplinary work is not an invitation to be an inch deep on everything, but it’s really an invitation to drill down deep in a couple of places, and that if you really wanna do that, it takes more time and it takes more effort.

JP FLORES: Definitely. Given your background and expertise, I’m curious what your thoughts are on the state of STEM right now. So me, for me, I’m very interested in diversifying the STEM workforce. Do you have any insight on what you think we can do as a society to make sure that we can do that, to make sure that we can get more historically underrepresented people in science and STEM, and in positions like this so that we can bridge science and society?

ALONDRA NELSON: Yeah. So I think to link back to your question a bit more about the imposter syndrome, which I didn’t fully answer: there are communities, particularly communities of color in the United States and elsewhere, you can think about Puerto Rico and other places, where over the history of science and medicine in the United States, we have thought it was perfectly okay to do experimentation on certain communities: on people who were in the armed services, that depending, you know, that was often, those were often disproportionately men of color in the armed services. So to the imposter question, the imposter syndrome question, I mean, I think certainly in fields like science and technology where there have been these kinds of histories of exploitation or of marginalization, you know, it is an open question and an active practice to sort of think about how one can feel and whether one wants to feel fully a part of those communities, how to sort of navigate that. And so, you know, so the imposter syndrome can be a bit of a double edged thing. It can be both, you know, a shield, like, you know, I want to be part of that, but not that way as it was done historically, and so I want to imagine a different way to do it. But it can also be obviously corrosive if one doesn’t feel part of their labs or their research collaborations and these sorts of things. So I would say we all feel it in different contexts. I think it’s more acute for communities of color who’ve been, who in some instances literally had, you know, historically in the sort of scientific literature, their ability to sort of think and reason questioned, right? Like it’s like, you know, I come from a community in which it is still not, it’s still okay for people to pose questions about the variability for Black people to sort of actually reason, to have logic, to have intelligence. And so to be a person of African descent and then to sort of work in technical fields or scientific fields, you know, you’re not foolish to sort of look around the room or the lab table or the seminar room or the classroom and think, you know, people probably think I don’t even belong here, people probably think I can’t possibly, you know, shouldn’t possibly be here. And then if you think about the recent debates on DEI that we’ve been having as part of the culture wars over the last couple of years, in particular over the last year, you know, you sit in rooms where people are probably like, is he/ is she/ are they qualified to even be here? And so, you know, one just has to know for yourself that you are absolutely qualified to be in these spaces and in these rooms. I’ve had personally the tremendous gift of my parents who both grew up under Jim Crow, like grew up under formal legal segregation, racial segregation in the United States, and yet, really believe in the ideals of this country. I mean, it is an extraordinary thing to me, that my parents believed this. And they raised me: you belong in every room, you belong at every table, you’re as smart as everyone else. I mean, my parents told me that in some way every day. And I know most people don’t have that, so it’s a tremendous gift. And so to be one of their four children who was sort of raised to sort of believe that, like my parents would literally say, “you can do anything you want”. And I know that people say that, but my parents really meant it and really expected me to understand that. And so, I also have the tremendous gift with, to your imposter syndrome question, of having just, you know, just this incredible foundation in my parents. So on the question of STEM, you know, I started thinking and working on this, with most concentration during my time working in the Biden Harris administration from 2021 to 2023. Because this is a national priority, right? You know, we’ve got a few different sort of issues coming to the fore. So we’ve got concerns about competition from China, and in particular you know from the Chinese Communist Party, that has led to discriminatory and xenophobic policies that have, you know, targeted scientists and researchers of Asian descent, of Chinese descent. And I think, have caused researchers, graduate students of Asian descent and particularly of Chinese or Chinese American descent to second guess whether they really want to study in the United States, or if they want to do their research in the United States. And I think national security concerns are legitimate and should be taken seriously, but, I don’t think it’s an arguable point that, and I also know we have a long historical track record of this, where there are ways in which these concerns have been operationalized in ways that have been profoundly discriminatory. And so, you’ve got that context happening, and then you have tremendous pressure to grow the STEM fields and to grow, and to have more people in them, to expand them, to have the best scientists in the world sort of assembling and galvanized by their work in the United States at a time when, broader context, it is, the politics of the United States make it increasingly hard to have immigration. So not only of scientists of Asian descent, but immigration more generally. It’s become much more constrained. And so, we don’t have the same flows of immigration coming to the United States for the STEM fields. And so those were the kinds of policy questions when I was working and leading the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy we were trying to think through. So then the question becomes, okay, then it’s really pretty important that we listen to and retain and help to thrive, the scientists that we do have working in STEM and addition to, and learn from them about how to create career trajectories and pathways that work that, you know, that they want, that that are important for them. And so, you know, I think the last few years with things like the March for Science during the pandemic a lot of scientists were speaking out about, you know, their ability or inability to do their work. There was a lot more listening, I think, on the part of all of us, and I think, on the part of government. And so when I was working at the White House, we did a process over a year long that was talking to people in civil society, and you know, state and local government, people who run after school programs, community college programs: you know, how do we think about enriching the STEM sort of pipeline and community from the sort of K-12 to, you know, high schools, community college, college, university, post-bach, post-doc, and then people coming in and out of the workforce like, how do we begin to think about those? And we tried to think about, how do we put in better touch all of these different organizations that are working on a piece of this to be thinking about their work as part of a larger ecosystem? And how do we learn from listening to scientists, and people who want to pursue science? Be that in a university lab, or frankly, without a college degree, working in, you know, a technical field or a laboratory. And you know, people said that they wanted to feel supported in their work fully. So it needed to be okay that they were a lab technician and also a mom. It should be okay that they were, you know, neuro-diverse, and also trying to be, you know, a math teacher? And you know, so how do we think about the full person? How do we really think about, there was there was a time in which, like certainly, when I was being tracked into science and sort of high achieving student programs, that we understood science and science education and STEM education to be a kind of scarcity. Like you had to be good enough to, you know, if you didn’t get out of O-Chem, you couldn’t go to the, you know, you couldn’t go further in science, and you know that would really shut the door for you if you wanted to go to medical school, for example. And you know part of, I think the approach we need to do, and part of what we think we were trying to do in the White House work that I feel strongly about before that, and well, beyond that is, you know, science, and you know, tinkering with technological things can be a source of creativity and discovery for people. You know, it is not by chance that the UN Declaration of Human Rights includes a right to science and part as a sense of a part of kind of human imagination and human discovery, and it should be – we should have sort of STEM policy and programs and an orientation to it that’s about abundance, that like everyone should be in STEM, and it should be part of, being part of your, of a kind of a well-rounded liberal arts education, as opposed to feeling like you have to make people have to choose like, “I can only be a STEM person or literature person, or STEM person or policy person.” We all have the capability to ask questions about the physical world and to answer those questions, and we all have the possibility to sort of imagine philosophical questions about the world and to answer those questions. And so, you know, I think I’m much more holistic both in the kind of ecosystem of the work, and holistic about how we think about how STEM fits into people’s lives and worlds is long overdue. And I think, I hope, is increasingly the way that we think about these things.

JP FLORES: Yeah, no, beautifully said. And just to get a glimpse of your world, what is your favorite song right now? Let’s end on that question.

ALONDRA NELSON: What’s my favorite song? I don’t have a current favorite song. I’m very excited for the new Beyonce country album. And so, I very much like the two singles that she dropped on us, and I am eagerly awaiting Cowboy Carter, the full EP.

JP FLORES: That’s awesome, cool. Well, I won’t take up that much more of your time. So, thank you so much for coming on, and I’m looking forward to releasing this episode!

ALONDRA NELSON: Great! I wish you all the best with your work JP, and thank you for having me, it was great to talk to you.

JP FLORES: Yeah, thank you so much. It’s awesome meeting one of my role models.

ALONDRA NELSON: Aw thank you, you’re very kind. Okay, bye-bye!