Ifeoma Ajunwa

Dr. Ajunwa is an award-winning tenured law professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law and an adjunct Associate Professor at the Kenan-Flagler School of Business where she is a Rethinc. lab Fellow. She is also the Founding Director of the Artificial Intelligence Decision-Making Research (AI-DR) Program at UNC Law and a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University since 2017. Ajunwa is a 2019 recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, and a 2018 recipient of the Derrick A. Bell Award from the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). Previously, 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. She is also a certified Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) expert and consultant since 2020 and she has worked as advisory board member or thought leader with Fortune 500 tech companies.

Ajunwa’s research interests are at the intersection of law and technology with a particular focus on the ethical governance of workplace technologies. Her research focus is also on diversity and inclusion in the labor market and the workplace. Ajunwa’s forthcoming book, The Quantified Worker, which examines the role of technology in the workplace and its effects on management practices as moderated by employment law will be published by Cambridge University Press. 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 also previously served as a Board member for the Institute for Africa Development (IAD) and for the Cornell Prison Education Program (CPEP).

Ajunwa’s scholarly articles have been published or are forthcoming in both top law review and peer reviewed publications. She has been invited to testify before the U.S. Congress (Committee on  Education and Labor), governmental agencies such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (the CFPB), the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (the EEOC), and has served as a keynote speaker at several national and international conferences.  Ajunwa is currently a Contributor for Forbes. Her writing has also been published in other media such as the NY Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the Harvard Business Review, the ACLU Blog, etc. Ajunwa earned a Ph.D. in Sociology at Columbia University in the City of New York (emphasis on Organizational Theory and Law and Society) where she was a Paul F. Lazersfeld Fellow. Prior to graduate school, she also earned a law degree from the University of San Francisco School of Law where she received the AAUW Selected Professions Fellowship and the Frank C. Newman Fellowship. She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of California, Davis where she was a McNair Scholar.