Alondra Nelson teaches sociology and gender studies at Columbia University. She was previously on the faculty of Yale University, where she received the Poorvu Family Award for teaching excellence.

An interdisciplinary social scientist, Alondra writes about the intersections of science, technology, medicine and inequality. These themes are taken up in her most recent book, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination. She is also an editor of Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History, Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life, and “Afrofuturism,” a special issue of the journal Social Text.

Her next book, Reconciliation Projects: Race, Politics, and the Social Life of DNA, will trace how claims about heritage and ancestry are marshaled together with genetic analysis in a range of social ventures, including kin-keeping, reparations politics, citizenship projects, and public commemoration.

Alondra’s essays, reviews and commentary have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, Scientific American, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Guardian(London), among others. Her publications also include essays and articles on race and digital culture; “scientism” in black power politics; the use of racial categories in medicine; and the social implications of direct-to-consumer genetic testing and genetic genealogy.

An internationally recognized scholar, Nelson has been a visiting fellow at BIOS: Centre for the Study of Bioscience, Biomedicine, Biotechnology and Society at the London School of Economics and at the Bayerische Amerika-Akademie in Munich. In 2011, she was a senior fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.

Nelson received her B.A., magna cum laude, from the University of California, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She earned her Ph.D. from New York University in 2003.

A transplanted Californian, she lives in New York City.