Danah Boyd

Danah Boyd earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Information in 2008, where her dissertation, ‘Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics,’ focused on how teenagers utilize social media platforms like Facebook and MySpace. This foundational research built upon her earlier academic work, including an undergraduate thesis on depth cues in virtual reality completed at Brown University and a Master’s thesis on self-presentation in online environments from the MIT Media Lab. Boyd served as a fellow at the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University before joining Microsoft Research New England as a Social Media Researcher in 2009.

In 2011, she was selected as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. More recently, Boyd received the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Barlow/Pioneer Award in 2019 and was featured among ‘America’s Top 50 Women In Tech’ by Forbes in 2018. Currently, Danah Boyd holds prominent academic appointments as the Geri Gay Professor of Communication at Cornell University and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Georgetown University, while maintaining her role as a partner researcher at Microsoft Research. Her ongoing research explores how contemporary social inequities relate to technology, with a particular focus on data legitimacy, exemplified by her extensive work on the 2020 US Census.

She continues to contribute to public discourse through a wide array of published papers, articles, and talks on critical topics such as media manipulation, algorithmic fairness, and data bias, shaping public understanding of technology’s societal impact.