New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani named more than 400 advisors to serve on his transition committees earlier this month, including Princeton professor Ruha Benjamin, who was appointed to Mamdani’s Committee on Technology.
Awarded a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship in 2024, Benjamin’s research at the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, which she founded in 2020, aims to “rethink and retool the relationship between stories and statistics, power and technology, data and justice.” Benjamin has taught at Princeton since 2014, and was awarded the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2017.
Her research focuses on bias in data systems, algorithmic discrimination, and surveillance technologies, including facial recognition tools that disproportionately misidentify people of color. Benjamin is the author of several books on technology and inequality, including Race After Technology, which critiques what she terms the “New Jim Code” embedded in digital systems…