Timnit Gebru, Ph.D.

Timnit Gebru, Ph.D., is the founder and executive director of the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), an interdisciplinary and globally distributed AI research institute rooted in the belief that AI is not inevitable, its harms are preventable, and when its production and deployment include diverse perspectives and deliberate processes it can be beneficial. Prior to that she served as co-lead of the Ethical AI research team at Google but was fired in December 2020 for raising issues of discrimination in the workplace.

Born in Ethiopia to parents from Eritrea, Gebru fled the region during a time of war as a teenager and eventually arrived in the United States as a refugee. During her Ph.D. at Stanford University, she co-founded Black in AI, a nonprofit that works to increase the presence, inclusion, visibility, and health of Black people in the field of AI. She is on the board of AddisCoder, a nonprofit dedicated to teaching algorithms and computer programming to Ethiopian and Jamaican high school students.

Gebru has received several accolades including being named one of Nature’s “ten people who helped shape science in 2021,” and one of TIME “100 most influential people of 2022.” She is currently writing The View from Somewhere, a memoir and manifesto arguing for a technological future that serves our communities instead of one that is used for surveillance, warfare, and the centralization of power by Silicon Valley.