Historian, author & AI researcher
I will perpetually be a student, but I have also been the professor. I am always learning and often writing, typically with a surprising take on tech and history.
A first-generation college student turned Yale PhD, I have launched education programs, taught and led AI research at NYU, and shared my expertise from the United Nations to Google.
- Award-winning book
- Harvard University Press, 2018
- PhD, Yale
- History, 2015
- Professor
- New York University
Michigan State University - AI researcher
- AI Now & Center for Responsible AI
Writing
First book
A People's History of Computing in the United States
Harvard University Press, 2018. Recognized as a “greatest tech book of all time” and reviewed in the LA Review of Books, The Nation, Public Books and the Australian Book Review, among others.
Contributor
“You Are Not Expected to Understand This”: How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World (Princeton University Press, 2022), which grew out of Slate’s popular series “The Lines of Code that Changed Everything.”
Next book
I am writing about how women shaped technologies that changed the world, a project represented by Aevitas Creative.
Essays & articles in
Including Editor’s Choice distinction. All essays →
Speaking & consulting
Speaking
I have shared my tech expertise at venues ranging from the United Nations and Cambridge University to the Computer History Museum and Google.
Talks & podcasts →Film & TV
Consultant on the pilot television episode of Girls Code and the documentaries The Queen of Code and The Birth of BASIC.
Film + TV →Education
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American Academy of Arts & Sciences
Visiting Scholar (postdoctoral fellow), 2015–16
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Yale University
PhD in History, 2015
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MIT
Exchange Scholar, 2012–2014
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Duke University
Master’s degree
Earned while launching the PhD Program at the Sanford School of Public Policy.
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Dartmouth College
BA magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa
A first-generation four-year college student, I double-majored in mathematics and history. A term studying in London and researching at Girton College, Cambridge inspired me (eventually) to pursue a doctorate.
I’m now a cancer survivor.