Ifeoma Ajunwa

Ifeoma Ajunwa is the AI.Humanity Professor of Law and Ethics and the Founding Director of the AI and the Law Program at Emory Law. Starting January 2024, she will also be the Associate Dean for Projects and Partnerships. Additionally, Professor Ajunwa has been a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University since 2017. Her research interests are at the intersection of law and technology with a particular focus on the ethical governance of workplace technologies, and also on diversity and inclusion in the labor market and the workplace.

Previously, Professor Ajunwa was a tenured law professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law where she was the Founding Director of the Artificial Intelligence Decision-Making Research (AI-DR) Program at UNC Law. Additionally, she was an Associate professor in the Labor Relations, Law, and History Department of Cornell University’s Industrial and Labor Relations School (ILR) where she received the Junior Faculty Champion Award from Cornell University and earned tenure in 2020. Professor Ajunwa is also a certified Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) expert and consultant since 2020. She has worked as an advisory board member or thought leader with Fortune 500 tech companies.

Professor Ajunwa’s work is published or forthcoming in high impact factor law reviews of general interest: the California Law Review, Cardozo Law Review, Fordham Law Review, and Northwestern Law Review, as well as, the top law journals for specialty areas such as: anti-discrimination law (Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review), employment and labor law (Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law), and law and technology (Harvard Journal of Law and Technology). She has shared her writings and research in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, The Guardian, the BBC, NPR, etc. In 2020, she testified before the U.S. Congressional Committee on Education and Labor, and has spoken before governmental agencies, such as, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (the CFPB), and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (the EEOC).

In 2018, the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) awarded Professor Ajunwa the Derrick A. Bell Award in recognition of her scholarly and teaching efforts addressing racial discrimination. In 2019, the National Science Foundation (NSF) selected her NSF CAREER Award proposal on automated hiring for funding. And in 2020, She received a pioneer grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to research genetic testing as part of workplace wellness programs. Dr. Ajunwa is a Founding Board Member of the Labor Tech Research Network which is an international group of scholars committed to the research of the ethics of AI used in the workplace and for labor. She has previously served as a Board member for the Institute for Africa Development (IAD) and for the Cornell Prison Education Program (CPEP).