Okidegbe awarded Moorman-Simon Career Development Professorship
Award recognizes a faculty member who is conducting truly interdisciplinary work
Each year, Boston University has the pleasure of recognizing a number of talented junior faculty who are emerging as future leaders within their respective fields with the awarding of Career Development Professorships.
The awards include a three-year, non-renewable research award designed to support research, scholarship, and creative work, as well as defrayal of a portion of the recipients’ salary. Nominations are submitted by the academic deans, and awardees are selected by the Office of the Provost.
In a letter to University Deans, faculty, and staff, Provost Jean Morrison announced that CDS's very own Ngozi Okidegbe has been awarded the Moorman-Simon Interdisciplinary Career Development Professorship. This award -- made possible by the generous support of BU Trustee Ruth Moorman (CAS ’88, Wheelock ’89,’09) and her husband Sheldon Simon -- recognizes a faculty member pursuing truly interdisciplinary work.
Azer Bestavros, Associate Provost for Computing & Data Sciences, in announcing the award to the CDS community notes "Ngozi’s work on the potential and pitfalls of data and algorithms is of critical importance as she explicates how algorithms hold the possibility of offering opportunity to provide a voice to previously-excluded communities while also carrying great potential to exacerbate existing racial and socioeconomic inequities and injustices when they are used improperly. This is a crucially important area for computing and data science research that is ripe for interdisciplinary scholarship where BU can and is very well-poised to lead."
Going forward, Professor Okidegbe has a vibrant research agenda that will further explore the intersection of criminal law, criminal procedure, and law with technology. Although much of the previous scholarship in this nexus has attributed the racial effects of technology to biased data, lack of transparency, and failures of democratic accountability, Professor Okidegbe seeks to show more broadly how the current paradigm governing the deployment of these technologies operates to support the role that the criminal legal system plays in racial subordination and the extent to which these technologies are inextricably tied to racist projects within the criminal legal system.
In addition to her examination of the impact of the increased societal dependence on algorithmic decision making in general and criminal law in particular, Professor Okidegbe research is equally critical to technologists as it gives algorithm designers, architects, and developers the opportunity to take into consideration the broader legal and regulatory landscape – both in terms of the constraints on and the implications from deploying these algorithms. These constraints and implications are not easily discernable and are often unexpected, especially when the affected communities don’t have a voice because they are marginalized in one way or another.
Congratulations Ngozi! Read more about Ngozi and the other Career Development Professorship awardees in BU Today.